Wardian Case

The Wardian case was an early type of terrarium, a sealed protective container for plants. It found great use in the 19th century in protecting foreign plants imported to Europe from overseas, the great majority of which had previously died from exposure during long sea journeys, frustrating the many scientific and amateur botanists of the time.

The Wardian case was the direct forerunner of the modern terrarium and vivarium and the inspiration for the glass aquarium. It is named after Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791–1868) of London who promoted the case after experiments.^[1]

He published a book titled On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases in 1842.^{[2]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-2) A Scottish botanist named A. A. Maconochie had created a similar terrarium almost a decade earlier, but his failure to publish meant that Ward received credit as the sole inventor.^{[3]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-Atlantic2017-3)

Dr. Ward was a physician with a passion for botany. His personally collected herbarium amounted to 25,000 specimens. The ferns in his London garden in Wellclose Square, however, were being poisoned by London's air pollution, which consisted heavily of coal smoke and sulphuric acid.

Dr. Ward also kept cocoons of moths and the like in sealed glass bottles, and in one, he found that a fern spore and a species of grass had germinated and were growing in a bit of soil. Interested but not yet seeing the opportunities, he left the seal intact for about four years, noting that the grass actually bloomed once. After that time however, the seal had become rusted, and the plants soon died from the bad air.^{[4]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-GAERTNER-4) Understanding the possibilities, he had a carpenter build him a closely fitted glazed wooden case and found that ferns grown in it thrived.

Dr. Ward published his experiment and followed it up with a book in 1842, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases.

English botanists and commercial nurserymen had been passionately prospecting the world for new plants since the end of the 16th century, but these had to travel as seeds or corms, or as dry rhizomes and roots, as salty air, lack of light, lack of fresh water and lack of sufficient care often destroyed all or almost all plants even in large shipments.^{[4]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-GAERTNER-4) With the new Wardian cases, tender young plants could be set on deck to benefit from daylight and the**condensed**moisture within the case that kept them watered, but protected from salt spray.**^[3]^**

The first test of the glazed cases was made in July 1833, (after 3 yrs exerim. + Loddinge nursery) when Dr. Ward shipped two specially constructed glazed cases filled with British ferns and grasses all the way to**[**Sydney**, Australia, a voyage of several months that found the protected plants still in good condition upon arrival. Somewhat more interesting plants made the return trip: a number of Australian native species that had never survived the transportation previously.^{[3]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-Atlantic2017-3) The plants arrived in good shape, after a stormy voyage around Cape Horn.

One of Dr. Ward's correspondents was William Jackson Hooker, later director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Hooker's son Joseph Dalton Hooker was one of the first plant explorers to use the new Wardian cases, when he shipped live plants back to England from New Zealand in 1841, during the pioneering voyage of HMS *Erebus* that circumnavigated Antarctica.

Wardian cases soon became features of stylish drawing rooms in Western Europe and the United States. In the polluted air of Victorian cities, the fern craze and the craze for growing orchids that followed owed much of their impetus to the new Wardian cases.

More importantly, the Wardian case unleashed a revolution in the mobility of commercially important plants.

****Tea

In Wardian cases, **Robert Fortune**shippedto British India 20,000 tea plants smuggled out of Shanghai, China, to begin the tea plantations of Assam in 1849.

Quinine

In 1860 Clements Markham used Wardian cases to smuggle the**cinchona**plant out of South America.**^[3]^**

Rubber

in the 1870s, after germination of imported heveaseeds in the heated glasshouses of Kew, seedlings of the rubber treeof Brazil were shipped successfully in Wardian cases to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the new British territories inMalayato start the rubber plantations.

Wardian cases have thus been credited for helping break geographicmonopoliesin the production of important agricultural goods.^{[3]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-Atlantic2017-3)****\@

SMUGGLING: Rubber, chinchona, tea.

Kew Gardens used Wardian cases to ship plants abroad up until 1962.^{[3]^}(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardian_case#cite_note-Atlantic2017-3)

The oldest surviving Wardian case is believed to be from circa 1880, discovered at Tregothnan in 1999.

Dr. Ward was always active in the Society of Apothecaries of London, of which he became Master in 1854. Until very recently, the Society managed the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, the oldest botanical garden in the UK. Ward was a founding member of both the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Microscopical Society, a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved the Plant Kingdom

Arnoldia – Volume 74, Issue 4

Ward, Nathaniel Bagshaw (1791–1868), botanist, was born in London, the son of Stephen Smith Ward, general practitioner, of Whitechapel. Everyday contact with the nearby docks stimulated a longing for a sailor's life and he was sent on a voyage to Jamaica at the age of thirteen, which, while it succeeded in curing him of that ambition, developed instead a lifelong appetite for luxuriant vegetation. He decided on a medical career and attended lectures at the London Hospital and those given at the Chelsea Physic Garden by the demonstrator to the Society of Apothecaries, Thomas Wheeler, who was a charismatic leader of its plant-hunting excursions into the countryside. Ward was one of many captivated by these: after he qualified in 1812 and joined his father's practice, he kept up a taste for rising before dawn in summer and snatching a few hours in the fields for botanizing before morning surgery. About 1817 he married Charlotte Witte. The couple had nine children.

A dedicated gardener, Ward at first found the polluted atmosphere of London's East End repeatedly frustrated his efforts. In 1830, however, the chance sprouting of some seedlings in a bottle in which he had placed a chrysalis suggested a solution: if protected with an almost airtight casing of glass, plants could be kept alive indefinitely by the interacting effects of sunlight, soil, and their own transpiration. Though anticipated in this discovery by a professor of law at Glasgow University, Alexander Maconochie (1806–1885), Ward was the first to provide practical demonstration of the principle on an extensive scale and make it widely known.

Three years of successful experimenting in collaboration with Loddiges' nursery culminated in the dispatch in 1833 of two of the resulting small cases to Australia. When opened there months later, the plants inside were found to be still growing sturdily; the cases were then refilled and on the return journey their contents again passed unharmed through snow and equatorial heat alike. Meanwhile John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) had visited Ward's house, seen with astonishment its profusion of greenery, and dashed off an excited report in his widely read Gardener's Magazine. In the next issue Ward was induced to provide the first exposition in print of the underlying principle and the method of constructing what were thenceforward known as Wardian cases. Through shortage of time (or diffidence) that was a mere brief note, as were further communications of his in 1836 in the Transactions of the Society of Arts and the Companion to the Botanical Magazine, the latter run off for private circulation among his friends. Lectures and demonstrations to various learned bodies increasingly followed, but only in 1842 did he eventually come forward with a properly detailed account, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases; by then the décor of many a gas-lit home had already acquired through this means a permanent accession of foliage, particularly of ferns.

The aesthetic impact of Wardian cases was far outweighed, however, by the possibilities they opened up for colonial agriculture. Early adopted by Kew, they substantially changed the world economy****** by enabling plantation crops to be transferred to novel regions: **tea from China to the Himalayas, **cinchona from the Andes to India and Java, **rubber from the Amazon to Ceylon and Malaya. Rarely has an observation so simple had such far-reaching results.

Nor was the impact solely botanical. In 1836 Ward pointed out that animals could be kept alive on just the same principle. The parallel invention by him of the vivarium followed and, in 1841, of what he termed the 'aqua-vivarium', though the later fashion for aquariums was mainly due to the writings of Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), and the working out of the oxygenating principle that made them possible was the achievement of Robert Warington.

Ward's allegiance to the Society of Apothecaries proved enduring. For many years he managed its Chelsea garden, initiating numerous improvements, and acted as the examiner in botany. This led to his election as master in 1854. As a botanical investigator, though, he was content with a largely passive role and published almost nothing: his election as FRS in 1852 was for forwarding science in other ways, notably by the pivotal part he played in it socially.Through his often weekly soirées—his 'stitching parties',as he dubbed them dismissively—his successive houses were, in J. D. Hooker's words, 'the most frequent metropolitan resort of naturalists from all quarters of the globe of any since Sir Joseph Banks' day' (Gardeners' Chronicle, 20 June 1868). Displays of microscopy were a particular feature at these occasions and led to the founding in 1839 of what became the Royal Microscopical Society.

Cheerful and genial, an excellent raconteur with a large store of anecdotes, Ward was at the same time self-effacing almost to a fault, leaving it to others to speak up on his behalf when he failed to receive recognition he was felt to deserve and to agitate for the repeal of the onerous excise duties on glass; the latter was a cause especially dear to him, in his wish to see hospitals and the inner areas of cities benefit from what he believed to be the therapeutic ambience of living plants. Foremost among these champions was his eldest son, Stephen Henry Ward MD, one of two sons who carried on the family's medical tradition.

On retiring from practice Ward moved to Clapham Rise, in the more salubrious southern environs of London, where he named his house The Ferns. He died at St Leonards, Sussex, on 4 June 1868 and was buried in Norwood cemetery on 10 June. His herbarium of 25,000 specimens was divided between the British Museum and Oxford University. A genus of South African mosses, Wardia, was named after him.

Sources

J. Hooker, ‘Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward’, Gardeners' Chronicle (20 June 1868), 655–6

D. E. Allen, The Victorian fern craze (1969), 8–16

S. H. Ward, ‘On the growth of plants in closely glazed cases’, Notices of the Proceedings at the Meetings of the Members of the Royal Institution, 1 (1854), 407–12

D. E. Allen, ‘Dr Ward's case’, BMJ (10 May 1975), 324–6

J. H. Balfour, Transactions of the Botanical Society [Edinburgh], 9 (1868), 426–30

S. Hibberd, Rustic adornments for homes of taste (1856)

Archives

Linn. Soc., corresp.

Harvard U., letters to Asa Gray

Likenesses

J. P. Knight, oils, 1856, Society of Apothecaries, Apothecaries' Hall, London

R. J. Lane, lithograph, 1859 (after J. P. Knight), NPG

A. A. Hunt, oils, 1867, Linn. Soc.

Maull & Polyblank, photograph, RS

Wealth at Death