Dr. Luke Keogh

And so that was also a significant part of the story as well.

And they led to these very, very large cinchona plantations, which were very important in the 1850s at that point in time.

And also the Dutch played a role here.

It wasn't just the British.

So Dutch went and moved plants.

And that was also important for their imperial interests in places around Indonesia.

And also there's stories that you read of moving Wardian cases with indentured laborers.

So they would be moving them from, let's say, the port all the way up to where the plantation was meant to be.

I don't think Ward did have much grasp on that, but I think it was a thriving time where things were being moved and there was a lot of changes happening.

And so something as efficient as being able to move live plants efficiently was quite important.

Part of the reason I got interested in the Wardian case was that it moved all these plants around the world, but it also had a lot of impacts.

And so if you're moving plants

an environment from one location to another, there's a lot of unintended consequences.

They say in one cubic metre of soil are millions of tiny little organisms and these sorts of things.

If you're moving a box that's full of soil with plants growing in it, you're actually moving environments from different locations.

And so this is one of the impacts of the Wardian case, is that it led to a lot of invasive species to be moved around the globe.

it led to a lot of unintended consequences, such as plant pathogens to be moved in this soil and these sorts of things.

And part of that does start to come into the end of why they stopped being used in the 20th century.

It's a great story and it helps to show how we've changed the world.

Through this small box you can see these very big changes around the world.