The houseplant that changed the British Empire
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:36
2
What challenges did gardening face during the Industrial Revolution?
0:36–1:05
3
How did the obsession with exotic plants emerge in London?
1:05–1:18
4
What invention changed the survival rate of transported plants?
1:18–3:06
5
Who was Nathaniel Ward and what was his contribution?
3:06–4:21
6
How did Ward's experiments lead to the creation of the Wardian case?
4:21–5:40
7
What impact did the Wardian case have on global trade?
5:40–9:12
8
How did the Wardian case facilitate the British tea industry?
9:12–25:44