Marc Finnell

And that shift can be traced back to two things.

One, the Wardian case, and an Englishman named Henry Wickham, who smuggled around 70,000 rubber seeds out of Brazil, got them to Kew Gardens in London, where they grew into seedlings in Kew's greenhouses, and then suddenly the British Empire had the foundations of its own rubber industry.

Oh, and there's more.

The other incredibly important plant that was transported in a Wardian case, that would be quinine from the cinchona tree.

The story of the Wardian case is a complicated one.

Yes, on one level it's just about an invention, but it's also about power.

Who had the power to move these plants around the world, and who didn't?

It's about the countless hands these cases passed through, the people who carried them, tended them, loaded them onto ships, and worked on the plantations that followed.

It's a story about plants being uprooted from one part of the world and transplanted into another, and the enormous consequences that came with that.

And the Wardian case was one of the crucial tools affecting food, science, trade, industry.

If you told Nathaniel Ward that his glass plant box would end up reshaping world history, I'm not sure he'd have believed you.

The thing about the Wardian case is that, yes, it was a microenvironment housing a plant, but it also housed soil, which could introduce some nasty things to its new home.

After a century of being used all around the world, the Wardian case was eventually phased out.

Partially because of its habit of introducing invasive species, but also international transport just got faster.

You didn't have to put plants on long ship journeys, you could pluck them, wrap them in plastic and fly them to their new home.

Today, there are only about a dozen original Wardian cases left.

Most of them are in Kew Gardens in London.

But in Australia, there is one.

This is Deborah Tyler, president of the Waroona Historical Society, which is south of Perth.

To this day, the far-reaching consequences and colonial legacy of the Wardian case still felt all over the world.