Emma Sibley, founder of London Terrariums, reveals how these miniature worlds cast a spell on her – and how you can share the magic by making your own…
Words: Emma Sibley Photography: London Terrariums / Kathrin McCrea
About five years ago, I began making terrariums. It started with a few friends hanging out at the weekend and making bottle gardens. It sounds funny now, thinking back, but throughout university, while living in London, houseplants played a leading role in birthday presents and moving gifts, the generous spider plant spreading its babies among our group of friends. Living in London we were all constantly moving house. Every year a new bedroom would need decorating and one of the main constants we all had were our houseplants. Making terrariums was just a development of this interest.
As soon as I had made a few terrariums, I could see how this was going to become a new passion. Not having a garden in London, I would wait for a day at work to finish so I could get home and take over my kitchen table making these miniature gardens, just experimenting with which plants worked and which plants didn’t. My mum later reminded me that as a child throughout the summer holidays at my grandparents’ house, I would be given a seed tray and would spend hours outside making gardens using acorn shells and compact mirrors for ponds. I guess running London Terrariums means that things have come full circle!
However, it wasn’t until I started reading about the history and science of these miniature ecosystems that I became fascinated by them.
Originally a Victorian discovery, the self-sustaining terrarium was invented by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward. Growing up, he developed a love of all ferns, regularly trying to grow them both indoors and in his garden, but without too much success. Ward was an entomologist and one day found a small sphinx moth chrysalis, which he popped on a bed of compost inside a sealed glass jar. Monitoring the moth over the next few weeks, Ward noticed what he thought was grass growing from the compost. It later turned out that this was actually a fern sprouting. This baffled him, so he set up a few small jam-jar experiments and figured out that sealed glass containers were the perfect environment for many different plants to thrive.
WORLDS UNDER GLASS
The glass protected the plants from any dust or pollution (a major factor in Victorian England), maintained a high humidity and regulated the temperature, creating a very stable environment for the plants inside. Ward
