Marc Finnell

We are in London, at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

It is dirty and polluted because, well, it's London at the height of the Industrial Revolution.

Now that is a particularly challenging time if you, my friend, are into gardening.

And yet people here in London, they are determined, nay, obsessed with plants, trees, botany of all kind from the furthest reaches of Earth.

And that is a problem because transporting these valuable plants from all around the world to London...

Just imagine you spent all this money getting this plant here, you crack open the crate and inside is nothing but soil and dead sticks.

But all of that changed when a doctor invented a device that would shift the global balance of power.

My name is Mark Finnell, and this is the saga of how a houseplant addict, some exotic botany, and one curious box rewrote the fate of an empire.

And no one saw it coming.

Say hello to Luke Keogh.

He's a curator and historian with one of the biggest smiles I've ever seen on somebody with a PhD.

And one plant in particular has cropped up a lot in Luke's work.

The leaves are delicate, almost like lace.

And back in Victorian England, this particular plant was associated with clean air and health because, you know, they didn't have much of that.

And thus this particular plant became a status symbol.

Which plant am I talking about?

So if you, if you want ferns, you have to go get them.

And the problem with that is that often ferns are very far away.

Uh, out of curiosity, when you go and try and get ferns from a far away place on a boat, how at this point was it going for people?

And so what were the sorts of...