PREDICTED BY NEWTON’S PRISM and the sealed jar of mint in which Joseph Priestley began to uncover the mysteries of photosynthesis, glass became the transforming medium of Victorian life, and especially of botany. It had properties which seemed custom made for the mood of the times. It could foster inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness, encourage aspiration and deep conservatism. Glass could make an enclosure and a window. It enabled private collection and philanthropic sharing, dissolving the barriers between capitalist adventure and communal experience. Its transparency suggested that in an era of such colonial discovery and scientific novelty, there was nothing that could remain unknown. When it came to plants, glass could be both protective and stimulating, excluding cold and the ravages of pests, but always letting in light, the Victorians’ pervasive metaphor for spiritual and earthly knowledge. More immediately, it could set up a show, even a spectacle. What became known as the Wardian case was the prototype of what were to develop into immense botanical theatres, the nineteenth century’s glass arks.
Nathaniel Ward was a doctor working in Whitechapel, one of the poorest and most rundown areas of east London. Professionally, he was concerned about the pervasively grim and devitalised atmosphere of the metropolis, and the impact of its polluted air on his patients’ health. He was also an amateur entomologist, and in the autumn of 1829 he sealed a hawkmoth chrysalis in a glass jar, to see if it could successfully over-winter. In the following spring, the hawkmoth hadn’t hatched, but in the jar were two lively organisms that had seemingly not been there before. A grass seedling and a small sprig of male fern had sprouted from some moist soil he’d accidentally left behind with the pupa. He had given them no water or any kind of attention over the winter months. He’d witnessed what Priestley had already discovered, that plants enclosed in airtight glass cases are self-sustaining. In sunlight the leaves transpire water, which condenses on the glass and drips down to be absorbed again by the roots. They give off oxygen during the day and reabsorb it at night. It is a closed system, limited only by the amount of nutrients in the soil.
It is odd that Ward was so surprised by what happened in his jar. Priestley’s discovery of the elements of gas transfer and photosynthesis in leaves seemed to have become stranded in the confines of chemistry, and didn’t influence botanical thought for another half-century. There had even been experiments with miniature greenhouses before Ward’s, which had sunk into obscurity. Around 1825 the Scottish botanist A. A. Maconochie wondered if plants accustomed to shade might thrive in a confined, moist atmosphere. He experimented with exotic ferns and club mosses obtained from the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, which he planted out in peat in a goldfish bowl. This was so successful he had a glass case specially built, in which he grew not just ferns but cacti and orchids. But he didn’t make his experiment public until 1839, by which time Ward was on the scene.
For years, Ward had been trying to grow ferns in his garden, but found it all but impossible in the toxic atmosphere of the East End. Now, inspired by his accidental experiment, he tried bringing them indoors and growing them in sealed glass jars on his window ledge, and within three years had raised thirty different species, including the delicate filmy fern, which he had collected himself from its locus classicus near Tunbridge Wells. He shared his experiences with George Loddiges, one of two brothers who owned a highly successful nursery in nearby Hackney. Loddiges quickly saw the commercial potential of the cases, and made up some stouter and more professional versions. When the perspicacious and influential botanist John Loudon looked them over in 1834, he told readers of the Gardener’s Magazine in March that Ward’s glass cases made up
the most extraordinary city garden we have ever beheld … The success attending Mr Ward’s experiments opens up extensive views as to their application in transporting plants from one country to another; in preserving plants in rooms, or in towns; and in forming miniature gardens or conservatories … as substitutes for bad views, or no views at all.
Ward, the public health reformer, had reached the same conclusion and imagined how ‘the air of London, when freed from adventitious matter, is as fitted to support vegetable life as the air of the country’. But Ward, the ambitious botanist, had also grasped opportunities hinted at by Loudon. In the book he eventually wrote about his experiments, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (1842), he reflected on the reasons why it was so difficult to convey plants on long sea journeys. He thought it was chiefly due to a ‘deficiency or redundancy of water, from the spray of the sea, or from want of light in protecting from the spray; it was, of course, evident that my new method offered a ready means of obviating these difficulties’. Later in 1834 he was ready for a field trial of his invention, and what it might contribute to the international plant trade. Two large cases, filled like botanical arks with English flowers and ferns, were loaded onto a clipper bound for the Antipodes. After a six-month voyage the cases were taken ashore in Sydney and unsealed. The contents were in perfect condition, with one primrose triumphantly in flower. For the return journey Ward had stipulated that the cases should be stocked with native Australian plants, and especially those with a record of being bad travellers. They included a specimen of gleichenia, a small creeping fern which had never survived attempts to ship it to England. The plants were subjected to the severest trials by sea and weather, enduring a storm-racked journey round the Horn, an equatorial crossing and temperatures which varied from −6 to +49 °C (21 to 120 °F). But when Ward went to collect them from the quayside, he found ‘the plants were all in beautiful health, and had grown to the full height of the case, the leaves pressing against the glass’.
Soon the cases were in mass production by the Loddiges brothers and others, and in the 1840s, were used to transport 20,000 tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas for the East India Company. Later, rubber trees grown from seed gathered in (and some say smuggled from) Brazil were despatched from Kew Gardens to distribution centres across the Far East. Wardian cases became vital tools in the late stages of botanical colonisation.
The possibilities of what could be done inside glass enclosures reverberated throughout Victorian society. There were dreams of glass-covered shopping arcades, and of an underground railway system mantled by glass (the Crystal Way). In the botanical world, Ward’s successful championing of the cause of tax-free glass resulted in a national efflorescence of large versions of his original cases. A suburban hothouse was now an economic possibility, and displays of exotic vegetation that had previously been the prerogative of the rich became accessible to any householder. The window ledge display and the conservatory had been born. The Empire’s luxuriant outposts lay just a step beyond the drawing room.
The glasshouse, full of living riches, was an all-embracing projection of the Victorian imagination. In the biggest, the trophies of Empire were kept safely captive but available for all to see. There was a sense of maternal gathering-in, of the glasshouse overriding the constraints of place and time. Rubber plants from South America could grow next to rhododendrons from India. Antipodean proteas might be in flower at the same moment as European apples were in fruit. The mythic idea of the Garden of Eden’s ‘constant spring’ was becoming a reality in the glass gardens of the English shires.
The grandest of all was at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s seat in Derbyshire, where Joseph Paxton was head gardener and hothouse architect. The Great Conservatory he had designed for the Duke was completed, and ready for its first plants, in 1839. No glass structure quite like it had ever been built before. It was 277 feet long, 123 feet wide and 67 feet at its highest point. It had a wrought-iron viewing gallery, and the aisles were wide enough for three carriages to be driven along abreast. One carriage passenger in 1851 was the King of Saxony, who described it simply as ‘a tropical scene with a glass sky’. What an ordinary visitor (there were 50,000 a year) might see was described by Paxton’s biographer, Kate Colquhoun:
Gleaming rock crystals from the Duke’s collection were also brought here for display, exotic birds flew among the branches and silver fish swam in pools beneath a plant collection that was simply unrivalled. There were massive, exotic foliage plants and ferns brought from the jungles and mountains of distant continents, orange trees brought from Malta, altingias and araucarias, date palms from the Tankerville collection, the feathery cocoa palm and the giant palm, Sabal blackburniana. There were hibiscus, bougainvillea, bananas, begonias, cassias, pepper and cinnamon trees, massive strelitzias – the bird of paradise flower – and hanging baskets of maidenhair fern … sugar cane, arum lilies and cycas.
It was a theatre made for star attractions, and they would not be long in arriving.