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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What challenges did gardening face during the Industrial Revolution?
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.
It's a little bit difficult in all that smog to get a few things growing.
And yet people here in London, they are determined, nay, obsessed with plants, trees, botany of all kind from the furthest reaches of Earth.
There was a thirst for plants, exotic plants at the time.
Chapter 3: How did the obsession with exotic plants emerge in London?
And if you wanted plants from different locations, you had to move them.
And that is a problem because transporting these valuable plants from all around the world to London...
Yet it's hard.
Chapter 4: What invention changed the survival rate of transported plants?
Only one in 1,000 plants arrived back in London alive.
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.
Through this small box you can see these very big changes around the world.
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.
Plants in history tell some interesting stories and they intersect with a lot of different parts of history, our environment, economy.
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 I often find myself in the 19th century, 18th century, looking at plants in history.
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?
People were collecting ferns. It's even called the fern craze.
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Chapter 5: Who was Nathaniel Ward and what was his contribution?
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?
At that time, it was hard to move plants because think about that to travel on a ship. They needed fresh water to travel. You need someone to care for them on the ship. And so it was quite difficult. Only one in 1,000 plants arrived back in London alive.
And so as people were moving plants from different colonial locations back to centres such as London, you weren't really getting many plants that would survive that journey.
And so what were the sorts of... ways in which people were trying to transport plants? Oh, there were lots of them.
So anything from a basket, some of them look a lot like a bookshelf in some ways, and inside it were sort of wire gauze all over the front of it and plants were standing up. There were open boxes, there were caskets that were closed. There were a whole range of ways that people were trying to move plants.
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Chapter 6: How did Ward's experiments lead to the creation of the Wardian case?
But one of the things on a ship was also difficult was that there were rodents, there were different animals eating these plants. And so the wire gauze or these sorts of things meant that they needed to be covered. But one of the biggest problems issues on board a ship was fresh water and also someone to just take care of those plants on a long journey that was many months long.
And so these were quite the challenge. So yes, there were people offering money and certain sums to come up with an idea of how to move different plants.
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?
Yeah, yeah. He's a medical doctor. And if we also think of most botanists in those days were also medical doctors because a doctor needed to know their plants. But yeah, he was a practicing, what we would know today as a GP. He would do his botanizing trips early mornings or on weekends or these sorts of times. And he would also tend his garden at his own place as well.
Nathaniel Ward isn't just a doctor and a naturalist. This guy's Rolodex is huge.
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Chapter 7: What impact did the Wardian case have on global trade?
He's incredibly well connected.
And so this is one of the things that is really important to understand about this early 19th century period is that if you had an interest in plants, let's say, and botany, then you might become connected to many important people of that period of time who are either working at botanic gardens, they're scientists, or they're very well-to-do people.
So he knew quite a few people, but he also was just experimenting in a Victorian sort of sense. And he was trying different things with what he could grow inside his house.
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.
He had a large family, so I think his wife and his daughters and his sons were also contributing to the growing greenhouse that was inside his house.
inside his house there's stories of on the dining room table there would be an exotic plant there under a bell jar and this bell jar is glass and it's sitting inside it there was a box that was filled with alpine plants that had a glass lid which was taken up to the roof of the house then brought back inside sitting on his windowsill was many many different plants
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.
And so inside his house one day, he is experimenting with a bottle with the cork on top, and he's actually trying to get a chrysalis of a butterfly to hatch. But what he notices inside is a fern that's growing that he couldn't get to grow outside his house on the rock wall because it was so polluted. But inside this bottle, it's growing.
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.
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Chapter 8: How did the Wardian case facilitate the British tea industry?
And one of the parts of those was to provide heat for them. But one of the really restricting parts that a lot of people couldn't have a greenhouse at their own location was the glass was very expensive. So glass had a tax on it. Therefore, many people couldn't find access to these.
But you see the emergence of middle class people having greenhouses as attached to their homes as wealth increases throughout this period of time.
So Ward has his eureka moment by creating a miniature glass house. He's now repeated the experiment on a few different plants around the house over a couple of years. Now the time has come to expand the experiment.
The next step was to say, okay, we can grow plants under glass in my home, but can I send plants long distances? Can I send them using this method over a long sea journey?
And this is the moment Nathaniel Ward creates the thing that would become his legacy. An object that on the surface looks incredibly humble, but this little box would help fuel global trade, imperial expansion, colonialism on a massive scale. And this is what it looked like.
It was inspired by terrariums, so I want you to picture a sturdy wooden box about the size of a large chest with big glass panels built into the sides and a peaked glass roof sitting on top. Inside, soil, plants, moisture. Basically, a tiny portable ecosystem. And the front panel, it would swing open so the plants inside could be tended to.
And there were handles on the sides so the whole thing could be hauled onto ships and dragged around the world. It doesn't sound revolutionary, but it completely changed what humans could transport across oceans alive.
And so they tested it. Plants were put inside. They were then taken onto a ship and that ship then sailed. Longest journey then known was to Australia. And so they sailed it to Australia.
At this point it's 1833 and getting from England to Australia by ship took around six months. So this was not exactly a quick test run. The Wardian cases were kept up on deck where the plants could still get sunlight while the glass protected them from salt spray, wild weather and just the general chaos of life at sea. And they specifically placed it on a part of the ship called the poop deck.
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