Marc Finnell

ways in which people were trying to transport plants?

Oh, there were lots of them.

And so into this story steps a very unlikely inventor.

Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward is, if you go through his CV to this point, none of it really screams like person who would rewrite the future of the British empire with an invention, but he he's a, he's a doctor, right?

Nathaniel Ward isn't just a doctor and a naturalist.

This guy's Rolodex is huge.

He's incredibly well connected.

Now, in Victorian England, having your home packed with rare plants was actually quite trendy.

There are some living rooms that would have looked less like houses and more like indoor jungles, including the home of Nathaniel Ward.

So there were plants in glass cases littered around Ward's home.

But he wasn't just surrounded by plants for aesthetics.

Ward was learning about the best conditions in which they grow.

It was like a home meets a greenhouse meets a science lab.

What Nathaniel has created, by pure accident, is a miniature, self-sustaining greenhouse.

A confined environment for his fern to thrive in, away from London's smog outside.

And living off a water cycle created inside the glass enclosure.

Now, just to be clear, Ward didn't invent the idea of people keeping plants alive under glass.

People have been playing around with versions of this for a very long time.

There's one example in ancient Rome where vegetables were grown for Emperor Tiberius in carts covered with a thin sheet of selenite.

In the 1800s, you start to get something closer to what we would recognise as a greenhouse, these big glass structures, white frames where you could walk around and maybe sit and have tea if you're feeling extremely Victorian.