the wardian case: environmental histories of a … · in alfred crosby’s pioneering study...

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The Wardian Case: Environmental Histories of a Box for Moving Plants Luke Keogh Abstract The Wardian case was a simple box that had major ecological impacts. It was invented in 1829 and allowed for the successful shipping of live plants between many countries and continents. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century humans using Wardian cases facilitated major plant migrations across the globe. As a result humans have overtaken earth processes as the largest mover of vascular plants on the planet. Boxes and cases have largely been neglected as important movers of species and ecologies; with a focus on the Wardian case this essay offers a unique contribution to field of environmental history. It also positions the importance of the case into contemporary discussions about the movement of plants in the Anthropocene. Introduction In 1829, the amateur naturalist and doctor Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward buried the chrysalis of a butterfly in moist soil in a wide mouthed bottle. He covered it with a lid and waited, watching it each day for signs of change. During the heat of the day he observed that moisture rose from the soil and condensed down the inside of the glass. Within a week a fern seedling and some grass had sprouted. The fern was more important than the insect. For years Ward was unsuccessful in his attempt to propagate ferns in his Wellclose Square home in East London. The sooty, dark and polluted area was not ideal for an avid naturalist and the principle of growing plants in closely glazed cases was a solution for his own collections.1 Constructed of glass and wood, the airtight case allowed plants to survive for much longer periods and withstand change in conditions. It also meant they could be moved over large distances and through varying climates with much greater chance of survival. As early as the eighteenth century the form of the Wardian case was known, but not its combination of glass and use as an enclosed micro-ecosystem. Within three years of his invention Ward had grown over thirty different species of plants in the Wardian cases in his London home. The following year he tested the case, on the longest journey then known, by sending plants to Australia. It was a success. The case was a simple invention that revolutionised the movement of plants. After the first experiment, the cases were used for over a century to move plants all over the globe with significant commercial, industrial and environmental consequences. By looking at the movement of plants in Wardian cases around the globe we can begin to observe that the case is much more than an object of Victorian curiosity. Historians of science have made us aware of the significance of the Case and its invention, but have not looked in any detail into the scale of the movement and its consequences.2 The Wardian case was the key technology for 1 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (London: Paternoster Row, 1842), 25-42. 2 Scholars have focussed on the invention, the inventions that came before and the fern craze. See, Margaret Flander Darby, “Unnatural History: Ward’s Glass Cases,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 35, 2 (2007), 635-647; Nigel Rigby, “The

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moving live plants for many groups, including: botanists, horticulturalists, colonists, nurseries and agriculturalists. The case is an artefact of a period in global environmental change that is of great importance. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century humans using Wardian cases facilitated major plant migrations across the globe. Intentions and Invasions This paper focuses on the Wardian case as an object that was both simple and complex. It was simple in its design and was easily adapted by its various users, but was carried over complex global networks. Historian Emily Rosenberg reminds us that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the global flows of migrants, commodities, and ideas surged through circuitry that, generally, became denser—but at different speeds and with various effects.” 3 During this period time and space compressed which brought people and knowledge together. In a different way Vaclav Smil has offered a unique analysis of globalisation by focussing on two “prime movers” of globalisation: the diesel engine now used in global shipping and the gas turbine used in aeroplanes. These ubiquitous technologies are not only reliable but their aggregate movement forms a “web of economic and human interaction and integration on a global scale.”4 The Wardian case is an earlier “prime mover” for plants that facilitated the movement of species in ever greater numbers and with ever greater success. The Wardian case had many environmental consequences. Invasion biologists working on the theme of biological globalisation have reserved a special place for the case. Not only was the Wardian case a “milestone in botanical innovation”, it was also, “a key vehicle for botanical globalisation.”5

Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation, 1769 - 1805”, in Science and Exploration in the Pacific, Margarette Lincoln ed. (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998), 81 – 100; Marianne Klemun, “Live Plants on the Way: Ship, Island, Botanical Garden, Paradise and Container as Systematic Flexible Connected Spaces in Between,” Journal of History of Science and Technology, 5 (2012), 30-48; David Allen, The Victorian Fern Craze: A History of Pteridomania (London: Hutchinson, 1969). 3 Emily S. Rosenberg, “Introduction”, in Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting: 1870-1945, (Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 2012), 7. 4 Vaclav Smil, “Two Prime Movers of Globalization: History and Impact of Diesel Engines and Gas Turbines,” Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 373-394. 5 Wouter van der Weijden, R.J. Lewis, and Pieter Bol, Biological Globalisation: Bio-Invasions and Their Impacts on Nature, the Economy and Public Health (Amsterdam: KNNV, 2007), 31-32.


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Figure 1. Wardian case for moving plants on sea voyages. From N.B. Ward On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (1852) p.71. Image courtesy Harvard University, Gray Herbarium Library. Following boxes provides a deeper understanding of how things move. One example for historians is Mark Levinson’s study of the shipping container. Levinson writes, about what was once considered a boring box, “I think academics ignored the container for so long because it seemed so prosaic.”6 Similarly, the story of the global impact of the Wardian case deserves closer attention from environmental historians as an interesting way to approach our histories. While some might question the Wardian case as merely a conveyance, this would miss the point of an interesting object that quite literally travelled the globe. Lynn Barber noted over three decades ago, “Kew’s Wardian cases were probably one of the best investments the British Government has ever made”.7 Recently global historian Stuart McCook notes: “the Wardian case solved a critical bottleneck in the long-distance transfer of plants”.8 And we can also look to commentators of the period on the importance of the case. H.F. Macmillan, director of Ceylon Botanic Gardens wrote about the case in his A Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting (1914): “Unquestionably the best means so far invented for transmitting plants over long journeys, especially by sea, is in wardian [sic] cases, by the aid of which the exchange of live plants between widely separated countries has been greatly

6 Mark Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the Global Economy Bigger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), xi. Another interesting history, of the few available, is Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). And on casks, see Diana Twede, “The Cask Age: the Technology and History of Wooden Barrels”, Packaging Technology and Science 18 (2005), 253-264. 7 Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (London: Cape, 1980), 112. 8 Stuart McCook, “Squares of Tropic Summer”: The Wardian Case, Victorian Horticulture, and the Logistics of Global Plant Transfers, 1770–1910” in Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (eds.) Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750-1850 pp. 199-215 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 214.


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facilitated.”9 The Wardian Case offers a new contribution to environmental history because it occupies a “space in between”.10 It is not migrant; it is a mover. In Alfred Crosby’s pioneering study Ecological Imperialism (1986) he described how Europeans did not arrive in the new world alone, rather they came with animals, viruses and weeds.11 For Crosby, the history of imperialism cannot be seen without the ecological migrants that were enabled with human movement, which had catastrophic effects for distant ecosystems. The work remains a classic for the field in that it placed at centre-stage the non-human and ecological aspects of imperialism and migration.12 Not just has this story been told by environmental historians. In Elton’s classic, The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants (1958), which also formed a foundational work for the science of invasion biology, he described how plants and animals travelled as part of the baggage of humans moving around the globe.13 Since 1800, coinciding with the invention of the Wardian case, there has been marked increase in the number of non-native species establishing themselves in many regions across the globe. It is recognised that non-native species, including many plants, are now one of the major drivers of global biodiversity loss and that economic impacts for the globe are as high as $120US billion annually.14 Due to human activities, of all the known vascular plants on earth, at least 3.9% have become naturalized outside their natural ranges.15 Furthermore, it has been well established, that humans, more than natural forces, are the largest disperser of vascular plants.16 Insights from invasion biology suggest that “invasions are an inherently multi-disciplinary issue”. 17 To understand the pathways, establishment and invasion of a species requires more than ecology, it requires dialogue with, among others, historians.18

9 H.F. Macmillan, A Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting (Cave: Colombo, 1914), 637. 10 Klemun, “Live Plants”, 38. 11 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). There has been much debate since Crosby’s book was first published. In contrast the historian Richard Grove has shown that the experiences of many colonials were not just destructive but often stimulated conservationist practices, Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1995). 12 Tom Griffiths, “Ecology and Empire: Towards an Australian History of the World,” in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds.), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, pp. 1-16 (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997). 13 Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (Methuen: London, 1958). See also, David M. Richardson, Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology: The Legacy of Charles Elton (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Libby Robin, “Resilience in the Anthropocene: a Biography”, in Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman (eds.), Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities, pp. 45-63 (New York: Routledge, 2014). 14 Reuben P. Keller, Juergen Geist, Jonathan M. Jeschke, and Ingolf Kuhn, “Invasive Species in Europe: Ecology, Status, and Policy”, Environmental Sciences Europe 23 (2011): 1-17; David Pimentel, Rodolfo Zuniga, Doug Morrison, “Update on the Environmental and Economic Costs Associated with Alien-Invasive Species in the United States,” Ecological Economics 52, 3 (2005): 273-288. 15 Mark van Kleunen et al., “Global Exchange and Accumulation of Non-Native Plants”, Nature 525 (2015): 100-103. 16 Richard N. Mack and Mark W. Lonsdale, “Humans as global plant dispersers: getting more than we bargained for,” BioScience 51, 2 (2001): 95-102. 17 Keller, et al., “Invasive Species in Europe,” 14. 18 Eric S. Higgs, “A Tale of Two Natures,” in Richard J. Hobbs, Eric S. Higgs, and Carol M. Hall (eds.), Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order, pp.293-295 (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). This has been taken up recently by Jodi Frawley and Iian McCalman in their edited volume Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities op.cit.


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By using Wardian cases people intentionally moved plants and environments. One aspect that Crosby largely neglected were these intentional movements of species. Recent work by environmental historians and historians of science highlight the importance of intentional movements of plants in shaping our environmental futures.19 Historical geographer Eric Pawson weighed into the discussion by invoking the metaphor of the web to contrast Crosby’s term, to show the “multi-directional complexity” that characterises plant movements. 20 Focussing on the Wardian case moving plants we can begin to see the influence of intentional human interventions in global ecological systems from a historical perspective. The remainder of the paper gives a broad overview of the impact and use of the Wardian case to show it as an important technology for moving plants. The paper proceeds in four parts. The first part charts some of the more common history of the Wardian case and describes some of the many well-known plants that were mobilised with the use of the case. Part two discusses both the design of the case and how the technology was co-constructed by the many interests that used it. Part three shows the importance of local workers and indentured labourers in the use of the Wardian case. Part four looks more closely at how the simple box helped botanic gardens move plants in colonial networks. The paper concludes by asking whether such a global technology might serve as one of many important artefacts of the Anthropocene age. Sending Plants For Nathanial Bagshaw Ward the invention of the Wardian case helped him keep alive his collection of ferns that for many years had suffered in the polluted London air. In the nineteenth century a Wardian case filled with ferns became a feature of many middle to upper class Victorian homes. In the same decade that Ward made his discoveries the Scottish botanist Allan Maconochie developed the airtight system for preserving plants, although limited evidence of this is available.21 Ward, normally a positive and encouraging man, was quite affronted by Maconochie’s claims to the invention and described them as ““one of the most barefaced falsehoods ever uttered”.22 Maconochie was magnanimous in the situation and deferred all authority to invention to Ward. Following this incident Ward’s name was forever connected in the naming of the case. For the social historian David Allen, the Victorian fern craze was possibly “the greatest and ultimately most destructive natural history

19 Among others, William Beinart and Karen Middleton, “Plant Transfer in Historical Perspective”, Environment and History 10 (2004), 3–29; James Beattie, “‘The Empire of the Rhododendron’: Reorienting New Zealand Garden History,” in Tom Brooking and Eric Pawson (eds.), Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand, pp. 241-257 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013); Phillip J. Pauly, “The Beauty and Menace of the Japanese Cherry Trees: Conflicting Visions of American Ecological Independence” Isis 87, 1 (1996), 51–74. 20 Eric Pawson, “Plants, Mobilities and Landscapes: Environmental Histories of Botanical Exchange”, Geography Compass 2, no. 5 (2008), 1464–77, 1474. 21 Allan Maconochie, “On the Use of Glass Cases for Rearing Plants Similar to those Recommended by N.B. Ward, Esq.,” Annual Report and Proceedings of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh 3 (1840): 96-97; Allan Maconochie, “Notice regarding the growth of plants in close glazed cases”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1845), 299. 22 Letter N.B. Ward to W.J. Hooker, 21 Apr. 1840, Folio 216, in Directors Correspondence, Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew [hereafter Kew Archives].


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fashion of all”.23 This is where the Wardian case has largely been preserved in much historical literature – as occupying a significant place in the natural history crazes of Victorian England.24 By 1851 the Wardian case full of plants was exhibited at the Great Exhibition. Inside the Crystal Palace, people could view live ornamental ferns brought from far off regions; they could also view Ward’s glass bottle with a plant in it that had apparently not been watered for 18 years.25 As Darby aptly concluded about the Wardian case in the Victorian era, it was both “an extreme and characteristic example of the Victorians’ artificial manipulation of nature”.26 It was certainly an artificial manipulation of nature, but casting our eye wider than the context of Victorian England, the scale of movement that the case facilitated is significant.27 As briefly noted above, four years after the first invention Ward tested his case by transporting a selection of ferns, mosses and grasses from London to Sydney. On 23 November 1833, Ward received a letter from Charles Mallard, the ship captain responsible for the two cases: “your experiment for the preservation of plants alive … has fully succeeded.”28 The next challenge was the return journey. In February 1834, the cases were replanted with specimens from Australia. In Sydney the temperature was over 30°C, rounding Cape Horn temperatures fell to -7°C, at Rio de Janeiro it reached nearly 40°C, and eight months later when Mallard’s ship travelled up the Thames the temperature was below 4°C. When Ward and friend George Loddiges, a well-known nurserymen from the famous Loddiges & Sons nursery, went aboard the ship in London they inspected the healthy fronds of a delicate Coral Fern (Gleichenia microphylla), an Australian plant never before seen in Britain. The garden designer and botanist John Loudon visited Ward in 1834, together both men were impressed with the potential the invention created: “a ready mode of importing most plants, without risk, from the most distant regions of the globe”.29 Indeed, when Ward published his monograph on the invention, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (1842), all of the supporting literature that he provided in the Appendix was from ship captains and international users applauding the case for its success in delivering plants to far-off locations.30 23 David Allen, “Tastes and Crazes,” in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E. C. Spray (eds.), Cultures of Natural History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 400. 24 This is largely due to the key works by David Elliston Allen, see for example The Victorian Fern Craze; The Naturalist in Britain. A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700-1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Sarah Whittingham, Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania (London: Francis Lincoln, 2012). Other leading commentators have also positioned the Wardian case in this way, see Lynn Barker, The Heyday; Stephen Jay Gould, “Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly,” in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History, pp. 57-73 (New York: Harmony Books, 1998). 25 Barker, The Heyday, 111; David R. Hershey, “Doctor Ward's Accidental Terrarium” The American Biology Teacher, 58, 5 (1996): 276-281. 26 See Darby, “Unnatural History”, 647. 27 Nigel Rigby, “The Politics and Pragmatics of Seaborne Plant Transportation, 1769 - 1805”, in Margarette Lincoln (ed.), Science and Exploration in the Pacific, pp.81-100 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1998); Klemun, “Live Plants”. 28 Charles Mallard to Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, 23 November 1833, in Ward, On the Growth, 77. 29 J.C. Loudon, “Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases”, Gardeners’ Magazine, vol. 10, April 1834, 208. 30 Ward, On the Growth,75-95.


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Following the first successful journey to Australia and back, Ward and his friends commenced moving more plants. In 1835, Ward sent to the head gardener for the Pacha of Egypt six cases of ornamental plants, and later, following this success, coffee plants were sent.31 Ward’s friend George Loddiges, who had accompanied him aboard Mallard’s ship to witness the first successful transplant from Australia, was more ambitious. He put into circulation over five hundred cases to all parts of the globe.32 It is the ingenuity and wide usage of Loddiges nurseries that established the Wardian case as the most compelling tool to use for transporting live plants.33 As early as 1836 the circulations of plants and technologies was very important. Loddiges sent a shipment of plants in the newly designed cases to Nathaniel Wallich the Director at the Calcutta Botanic Gardens; Wallich was so impressed by the case that he packed that same case and sent it on to the director of the Jardin des Plantes, Charles François Brisseau de Mirbel. The director at France’s premiere garden was equally impressed and passed on knowledge of the case to the famous Cel family who imported exotics to Paris. Mirbel returned Wallich’s case to India, and the Cel’s, grateful for the knowledge also sent a newly constructed case of plants to Wallich.34 The success of the Wardian case led to its continued use in many locations. The Horticultural Society of England encouraged the extensive use of the Wardian case. In 1848, a member of the Society, Robert Fortune travelled to China and successfully used Wardian cases to steal tea plants in one of the world’s greatest acts of botanical espionage. In total nearly 20,000 tea plants were moved from China to India—thus setting the foundations of the Assam and Sikkim tea industry in India.35 Often less known is that a decade later Robert Fortune, this time working for the US Patents Office, sent 26,000 tea seedlings in Wardian cases to Washington, D.C.; thus instigating the United States’ first experimental plant station in the centre of the capital. 36 The Wardian case was used in a range of other botanical appropriations. The cinchona tree, whose bark was used in quinine Malaria drugs, was moved in secret from Bolivia by the Dutch and British to be transplanted to Java and India.37 The rubber tree was appropriated from South America and transplanted, via Kew Gardens, to the Malay and Ceylon regions in Asia.38 In each of these examples the transplanted regions became leading global producers of the commodity.

31 Ward, On the Growth, 47. 32 Richard Clough “Opening the Wardian Case: Experiments in Plant Transportation”, Australian Garden History, 19,1 (2007): 4-6. 33 Nathaniel Wallich, “The Discovery of the Tea Shrub in India,” Gardener’s Magazine 15 (1835): 428-430. 34 First French case described in MM. de Mirbel, Cordier, de Blainville, de Freycinet, Savary, “Rapport de la Commission chargée, sur l’invitation de M. le Ministre de la Marine, de rédiger des instructions pour les observations scientifiques à faire pendant le voyage des corvettes de l’Etat l’Astrolabe et la Zélée, sous le commandement de M. le capitaine Dumont d’Urville”, in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, 5 (1837), 133-155. 35 Robert Fortune, A Journey to the Tea Countries of China (London: John Murray, 1852). 36 W. Gardener, “Robert Fortune and the Cultivation of Tea in the United States”, Arnoldia. 31(1979): 1-18. Phillip J. Pauly, Fruits and Plains: the Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, MA,: Harvard University Press, 2007). 37 “Spruce’s Travels in South America”, Nature 80 (1909): 458-460; Mark Honigsbaum The Fever Trail: The Hunt for the Cure for Malaria (London: Pan Books, 2002). 38 Henry N. Ridley, The Story of the Rubber Industry, with an Appendix by L. Lewton-Brain, Showing the Growth of the Rubber Industry in Malaya. (London: Waterlow, 1900); Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).


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Figure 2. U.S. Propagating Garden, National Mall, Washington, D.C., 1859. The glass houses pictured on the left and right received the tea plants that were sent to the U.S. in Wardian cases by Robert Fortune. From: Report of the Commissioner of Patents: Agriculture, 1859. Image courtesy of Tufts University Library. Many commercial crops in many colonies were established with the help of the Wardian case. The dwarf Cavendish banana was moved from China, via England, to the Samoan islands and spread throughout the South Pacific as a significant crop.39 When the Frenchman Henri Lecomte was charged with setting up gutta percha plantations in the French Colonies of the New World, he took with him plants safely packed in Wardian cases.40 The importance of the mango for Queensland, Australia, also relied on the case. Grafts of mango trees arrived in Brisbane, Australia, from India in Wardian cases. As early as 1858, better flavoured varieties arrived from Calcutta Botanic Gardens, but others also came from Java and Bombay.41 Constructing Cases Boxes have been used to move plants for over three centuries. The Wardian case is part of a long history of using boxes to move live plants that could be transported as seed. Some seeds are oily and degrade easily; at other times some plants simply do not travel well as seeds; and at others it is simply better to send seedlings as they can be quickly planted out on a plantation. By the late eighteenth century various designs by John Ellis in London and Andre Thouin in Paris had settled on the case with the sloping roof, shaped much like a miniature greenhouse, as the preferred design for plants.42 In 1824, John Lindley of the Royal Horticultural Society received at their gardens healthy plants in a case sent from Mauritus which was certainly a precursor to the Ward’s invention.43 And Nathaniel Wallich director of

39 Letter N.B. Ward to J.J. Bennett, 1 November 1842, in Proceedings of the Linnaen Society of London 1 (1848): 157. 40 “Our book shelf,” Nature 61 (1909): 538. 41 “The Mango of Queensland,” Brisbane Courier 12 Mar. 1870; “Queensland Acclimatisation Society,” Queenslander 3 Feb. 1877; Jodi Frawley, “Making Mangoes Move”, Transforming Cultures 3(2008): 165-184. 42 John Ellis, Directions for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants from the East-Indies and other Distant Countries in a State of Vegetation (Davis: London, 1770); Andre Thouin, Pours de Cultur de Naturalisation des Vegetaux. (Gerard: Paris, 1827), see in particular the Atlas, plate 15. 43 John Lindley, “Instructions for packing living plants in foreign countries,”, Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London 5 (1824), 192–200.


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the gardens in Calcutta sent cases with pearl inserts in the roof of the box to allow in light.44 Nathaniel Ward’s technological contribution was to promote the closed system of transporting plants. Where all previous cases allowed for the admission of fresh air, Ward showed that plants properly packed and lightly watered could be closed up and placed on the poop deck of the ship and could survive for long periods without water. Ward never patented a design for his case. He held the benevolent view that his cases could be of benefit to many, not just scientists and nurserymen. In 1845, Ward wrote in a letter to the Harvard botanist Asa Gray: “My closed cases are gradually extending amongst all classes of the community, and have been recommended in an official report to Government by the “Health of Towns Commission” as a means of improving the condition of the labouring poor”.45 It was a technology that he promoted through his many networks both at home and abroad. But the Wardian case was not a perfect technology. Especially on long distance shipments it often required many instructions or the help of ship captains. On Ward’s first shipment of plants to Australia much of the success of it must be granted to the ship captain Charles Mallard. Indeed, in the second letter Mallard wrote to Ward from Sydney congratulating him on the success of the cases, he concluded his letter to Ward with “PS. I ought to have mentioned that during the voyage the plants were watered but once, and that but a slight sprinkling near the Equator.”46 Although Ward included the letters from Mallard as key support for the success of his invention for transporting plants across the oceans, he neglected to include this post-script with his full length monograph in 1842 and also when it was reissued in 1852. As early as 1837, the nurseryman George Loddiges noted that “the failures which have occurred have been where neglect had manifestly taken place, either by keeping them in the dark, or in some cases by breaking glass.”47 It was common for ship captains to agree to take plants with them, and even for plant senders to see their cases placed perfectly on the ship deck, to only have the captains place the cases below deck once in the open seas, and the plants arrive at their destination dead.48

44 Nathaniel Wallich, “Upon the Preparation and Management of Plants during a Voyage from India.” Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London 1, 2nd series (1832): 140–43. 45 N.B. Ward to Asa Gray, 26 Dec. 1845, Asa Gray correspondence files of the Gray Herbarium 1838-1892, Library of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 46 Original letters of Mallard held in Kew Archives. See Charles Mallard to N.B. Ward, 18 Jan. 1834, Directors Correspondence Folio 151. 47 Quoted in James Yates, “Report of the Committee for Making Experiments on the Growth of Plants Under Glass, and Without any Free Communication with the outward Air; on the plan of Mr N.B. Ward of London” in Seventh Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (London, 1838), p.505. 48 See for example the description of the ship Emu in Robert Fortune, “Method of Transmitting Plants from One Country to Another by Sea in ‘Ward’s Cases’”, in Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China, 411–420 (London: John Murray, 1847).


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Figure 3. Various designs of the Wardian case: (A) case of James McNab, Edinburgh, modelled on designs given by N.B. Ward, 1839; (B) case used by James Backhouse and made onsite in Hobart, Australia, 1860; (C) case as patented by William Bull, 1870; (D) case used by Godefroy-Lebeuf nursery, Paris; (E) Kew’s Case, c1890; (E) case used by Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, c1920, notice the rectangular panel on the sides that allowed for stacking.


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Following its invention the Wardian case was picked up by many different people and went through various versions over many decades of use. Many different people interpreted what Ward had prescribed (see Figure 3). In the first designs in the 1830s there was a solid wooden base with a larger glass structure on the top. It was soon realised that a much more solid timber base with less glass was stronger. The timber for cases came from many locations. Loddiges nursery used teak wood from old East India company ships to build their cases.49 In general, the dimensions of the early cases including their glass roof were 36 inches in length, 28 inches in height, and 20 inches in width. The timber base that held the soil was usually only 10 inches deep.50 Some of these cases varied in size. In 1839, Joseph Hooker took with him on the Erebus a huge case that stood almost as tall as a sailor and was very heavy. Not surprisingly it never arrived back in London after it was shipped, most likely because it was so large and difficult to handle.51 More often than not the best way was to send smaller cases that could be handled by one or two sailors. While plants could be sent out from Europe based on predetermined designs of nurseries and botanical gardens and constructed by carpenters, for plant hunters in distant locations often cases were made onsite by local workers using local timber. As early as 1841 the collector George Gardner only took to Brazil with him “small squares” of glass so that cases could be made in Rio de Janeiro. 52 Gardner had four large boxes made from Brazilian timber based “somewhat on Mr Ward’s plan”.53 This practice continued for plant hunters in distant locations right through until the early twentieth century. At times the designs varied greatly. The plant hunter James Backhouse collected in Hobart, Australia, and was instructed: “We would like thee to order 2 more Wardian Cases to be made in Hobart Town similar in structure to the one we send”. Although the design was dictated from the nursery in York, these large three-feet wide boxes were built onsite and had one sloping roof. Plants of Gleichenia species were sent back to the Backhouse & Sons nursery in Leeds in 1860.54 By the 1860s the design of the case was still not one single unified form. In early April 1862, in the distant colony of Victoria, Australian the well-known nurseryman Thomas Lang delivered a lecture to the Ballarat Horticultural Society titled “On Wardian, or Plant Cases”.55 Lang began by describing his first encounter with the cases in Edinburgh. He went on to tell the audience of the “usefulness” of the cases for Victorian horticulturalists. He detailed the many useful plants, such as the giant Californian redwood, that he introduced with the help of the case. By his own exaggerated estimates Lang transported nearly a million plants to

49 Allen, The Victorian Fern Craze, 6. 50 Detailed description of the cases described by Mirbel in Mirbel et al. “Rapport”, 134-142. Mirbel had first hand experience of Loddiges cases as he had recently received some from Wallich in Calcutta. 51 J.D. Hooker to W.J. Hooker, 23 Nov. 1841, f.80, Joseph Hooker: Correspondence, 1839-1845 from the Antarctic expedition, Kew Archives. On not reaching Kew, see Kew Record Book: Inwards, 1828-1847, ms., Kew Archives, p.85. 52 N.B. Ward to W.J. Hooker, undated [postmarked 19 Apr. 1836], Folio 150, in Directors Correspondence, Kew Archives. 53 George Gardner to Hooker, 23 Mar. 1841, in Journal of Botany 4 (1842), 199-201. See also George Gardner, Travels in the Interior of Brazil Principally Through the Northern Provinces and the Gold and Diamond Districts during the Years 1836-1841 (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849). 54 James Backhouse letter to James Backhouse Walker, 22 Nov. 1860, in Uncatalogued Walker Letters, 1860-1871, University of Tasmania Library Special and Rare Materials Collection, Hobart. 55 Thomas Lang, “On Wardian, or Plant Cases,” Ballarat Star, 9 Apr. 1862, 1. For a longer discussion of Lang see Paul Fox, Clearings: Six Colonial Gardeners and Their Landscapes (Melbourne: Miegunya Press, 2004), 35-60.


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Victoria in just one decade in the late nineteenth century. But on that Tuesday evening in April 1862, it seemed that Lang’s oration was not enough. For the people in the room he brought along with him two Wardian cases that had just arrived in Ballarat from England carrying camellias and orchids. These two cases were both different. The first had the typical pitched roof with handles on the side and little feet to keep it up from the seawater on deck, such cases had been “in use for many years”. The other case was a newer design, it still had glass in the roof but was flat roofed and more compact in design. To see the Wardian case first-hand allowed the people in the room to materially grasp the work that was being done to transform the colony into an image of usefulness and beauty. In 1868, shortly before his death Ward complained in a letter from 24 April 1868, to Asa Gray, “my closed cases have never procured for me earning [or] the thanks of the parties most interested, whilst nearly all my leisure time has been occupied in receiving visits or answering letters regarding them.” 56 Ward died almost destitute and, what he felt, underappreciated. But the cases that bore his name were used long after his death. Indeed, their use increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century with the expansionary ideals of New Imperialism. The Wardian case had many designs and many different constructions. Various organisations used varying designs but all had some sort with glass inserts and largely relied on a closed or relatively closed system. Shortly after Ward’s death, the nurseryman William Bull of the famous exotic nursery on Kings Road, Chelsea, was granted a patent for “An Improved Case for the Conveyance of Plants”.57 It was basically a Wardian case that had openings in the box that allowed for greater ventilation. It was labelled “Bull’s Case”, but the name never really took hold. By the 1870s it was realized that airflow, a practice actually promoted in the eighteenth century, was needed inside cases. Two small one inch in diameter holes were drilled on the side to allow air to the plants. These holes, it was soon realized, needed to be covered with gauze to prevent vermin from entering the cases, also an eighteenth century problem. Users, whether they were organisations, institutions and nurseries, varied the design according to their needs, the type of plants being sent and the destination. It was, as historians of technology have reminded us, the co-construction of technology where various groups of civil society made and remade the case as to their needs.58 These were not just centralised botanical gardens designing cases but nurseries and plant collectors making cases. Indeed some of the leading innovations came from commercial nurseries. Often it was the needs of the plants and the practicalities of shipping that determined the design of the cases. 56 Letter N.B. Ward to Asa Gray, 24 April 1868, Asa Gray correspondence files of the Gray Herbarium 1838-1892, Library of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 57 Patent granted on 13 December 1870, William Bull, A Wholesale List of New Beautiful and Rare Plants Offered by William Bull (London: William Bull, 1870) p.170-172. 58 This is well described in Ruth Oldenziel and Mikael Hard Consumers, Tinkerers and Rebels: The People Who Shaped Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013).


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Unpacking Histories The practice of sending plants was reliant on actions and work at the colonial periphery and the work of many local and indentured workers. From local plant hunters and field scientists, to horticulturalists and agriculturalists, the Wardian case passed through many hands. Whether it was in China, Bolivia or the Malay Peninsula, often local people with botanical knowledge not only knew where to find plants but how to best transplant these into cases. When John Gibson, the gardener for the Duke of Devonshire used the Wardian cases in India in 1836 he used two local workers from the Khasi Hills named Ram Chund Maulee and Ramnarain Baugh. These guides helped Gibson find and pack plants, and were fundamental to the success of Gibson’s search for new ornamental plants for English enthusiasts. “[T]he benefit which this garden has derived from the above collectors [Maulee and Baugh] especially in the Orchideous sorts of plants is very considerable.”59 But the two native collectors Maulee and Baugh who had so vitally helped Gibson deserted him as soon as they came back down from Cherrapunji and never arrived back at the Calcutta gardens and never collected wages. Another example is the cinchona plant that was transplanted using Wardian cases from South America in the 1860s. It was common for local collectors of plants to place arsenic in the Wardian cases so that the plants would die on the voyage to other regions, thus protecting their local industry.60 But local people were also compensated unfairly. Clements Markham who collected cinchona for British interests, described his process, “to include very slight remuneration in the original agreements. Thus the loss to Government would be insignificant if the work was not executed satisfactorily.”61 Only if the work was satisfactory would full remuneration occur. But as Markham reflected disappointedly: “Those who did the work have not received fair recompense for most valuable services”.62 The cinchona plants in Markham’s fifteen Wardian cases would ultimately die in the heat of the Red Sea. An industry in cinchona was eventually set up in India and in Java with the seeds brought to England by Charles Ledger. More dramatically than Markham not paying his collectors was the collector of Charles Ledger’s seeds, Manuel Mamani, who was imprisoned in Bolivia for his involvement in the cinchona collection, and was severely beaten, resulting in his death.63

59 Details of Maulee and Baugh in Nathaniel Wallich to H.T. Prinsep, 9 Aug. 1837, India Office Records (IOR), P/13/24, nos 46-48, British Library, Archives, London. Gibson’s exploits are described in Kenneth Lemon, The Golden Age of Plant Hunters (New York: Barnes, 1968). 60 “Obituary: Hasskarl” Chemist and Druggist 20 Jan. 1894, 73-74; Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: The Hunt for the Cure for Malaria (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 61 Clements R. Markham, Peruvian Bark: A Popular Account of the Introduction of Chinchona into British India (London: John Murray, 1880), 271. 62 Markham, Peruvian Bark, v. 63 Gabrielle Gramiccia, The Life of Charles Ledger (1818-1905): Alpacas and Quinine (Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1988).


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Figure 4. Unpacking a Wardian case, sent from Berlin Botanic Gardens to Samoa, 1911. From Kolonie und Heimat, 21 May 1911, p.2.

There are other examples of the Wardian case in use at the contact zone of European botanical interests and colonial dispossession. Although appearing late in the game, German colonialism was quite typical of its time. It offers a window into this intense period of both New Imperialism and moving plants. As historian Ulrike Lindner has commented, “On many points German colonizers acted similarly to their imperial neighbours in the colonies and were meshed into a tight network of transnational and transcolonial interaction.”64 This colonising mission was almost always about expanding economic interests and controlling the resources and land of distant territories. The Germans put thousands of plants on the move. Many of them came from the central botanic gardens in Berlin. Most of the plants sent were economically important plants that could be grown and processed to make a profit. But at each turn there were always people working with plants to put them on the move. Images from the German journal Kolonie und Heimat illustrate (figure 4) how many people had to work with the plants. Samoa became a German colony in 1900, but German firms, such as the German Trading and Plantation Company (Deutsch Handels- und Plantagen-Gesellschaft), were operating on the island as early as 1879. One of the main issues that they constantly faced was the availability of labour. Following colonisation, German diplomatic channels opened discussions with

64 Ulrike Lindner, “Trans-Imperial orientation and knowledge transfers: German colonialism in the international context”, in German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2016), 29; Sabea, Hanan. “Pioneers of Empire?: The Making of Sisal Plantations in German East Africa, 1890–1917”, in Nina Berman, Klaus Muehlhahn, Patrice Nganang (eds.), German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, pp.114–29 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) See also Naranch, Bradley. “Introduction: German Colonialism Made Simple,” in Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley (eds), German Colonialism in a Global Age, 1–18 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).


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China to send workers to Samoa.65 Looking at the above image from Samoa there are a number of important details. These labourers are unloading what looks like a shipment of either cacao or rubber seedlings, both were important crops on the German controlled island of Upolu. Also looking closely at the men in the picture we see Chinese men unpacking plants. Over two thousand Chinese indentured labourers were brought to work alongside other indentured Melanesian workers. Conditions in Samoa were harsh. Wages were low and working days were over eleven hours, and sometimes they only had two Sundays off per month. Punishments could be issued for a range of misdemeanours even including not bowing low enough to your master. Chinese workers often protested the working conditions but were dealt severe penalties for disobedience. One worker, Wong Kim Tiu, worker No. 1239, who had threatened his employer, was handcuffed and tied to the veranda by his pigtail.66 Returning to the image of the Chinese and Melanesian labourers unpacking the Wardian case in Samoa there is also another detail that deserves attention. Does the case appear familiar? These Wardian cases sent out by Berlin Botanic Gardens were modelled on the designs of nurseryman William Bull in Chelsea. One of these cases still survives in the Berlin Botanic Garden and Botanic Museum (see below). Here we have a major botanical institution who is distributing thousands of plants to the colonies with great impact and the technology being used was copied from a nurseryman in Chelsea. It is a strange mix of colonial science and civil society. By seeing the use of the Wardian case in Samoa by indentured labourers we see not only how plants travel but how a technology travels and its impact on distant people. These are but three examples of the Wardian case in use by local workers and indentured labourers. But there are many examples of local people using Wardian cases and also constructing them. In Madagascar the French used local people to find and transport plants, and in Java the Dutch used local Indonesian workers to construct and create cases in their Buitenzorg gardens. Collecting and moving plants depended on global collaborations that crossed contact zones and bridged cultures and often lead to “interactive networks” but often to the disadvantage of local collectors and workers.67 At almost every turn local workers and collectors were key parts to putting plants on the move. While their stories are often difficult to find in the archive or in the grand stories of plant hunters, their importance should not be underestimated. Cases with Consequences In the late nineteenth century, when many political leaders pursuing a civilising mission and for firms looking to increase profits, agriculture became a central part of the colonial project. 65 Nancy Y.W. Tom, The Chinese in Western Samoa 1875-1985: The Dragon Came From Afar (Western Samoa Historical Trust: Apia, 1986),1; Malama Meleisea and Penelope Schoeffel, “Before and after colonisation: Germany in Samoa”, in German Colonialism: Fragments Past and Present (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2016), pp.118-127. 66 Tom, Chinese in Western Samoa, 1-11. For a similar treatment of workers in Africa see discussions in, W.A. Crabtree, “German Colonies in Africa”, Journal of the Royal African Society 14, 53 (1914), 1-14. 67 Emily S. Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents in a Shrinking World,” in Rosenberg, A World Connecting, op. cit., 910; Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3; Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, “Introduction”, in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence 1770-1820, pp. ix – xxxvii (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009).


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Moving plants to plantations required Wardian cases. By the late nineteenth century the knowledge of plants and their distribution extended to most parts of the globe. At the same time, the profits of firms and plantations operating in colonies was tied to a thorough scientific understanding of which plants could be cultivated in certain locations. Botany played an important role in the profitability of colonies. As important as understanding where plants might be transported was the possibility that these could be moved at all.68 Technological developments in Europe were an important ingredient in the spread of imperialism in this period. With a swag of technologies—including steam ships, railways, telegraphs and repeating rifles—Europeans were aided in taking their imperial mission to many parts of Africa and Asia. Other factors, such as faster shipping routes, also played an important role. With the opening of the Suez Canal freight rates fell by half between 1869 and 1910. The case sailed on these ships moving at greater speed around the globe. To look at the Wardian case we see an older technology, over seventy-years-old by the end of the century, that found new uses with the expansion of empires. Older technologies like the Wardian case were not just a ready means to move plants but also a link to earlier periods of informal imperialism. Where explorers and travellers and distant collectors from an earlier period sent an odd box or two, now botanic gardens set in motion hundreds of Wardian cases for the express purpose of colonial and commercial plantations.69 The field of colonial botany in the age of New Imperialism is vast and global so this section can only draw a few examples to highlight the use of the Wardian case in this period. Kew was the leading example of colonial botany that other nations with imperial ambitions tried to replicate. German and French colonial gardens drew on Kew’s example and used the Wardian case to great effect. In the first decade of the twentieth century the French probably moved more cases than Kew. The significance of Kew Gardens as a global hub of scientific knowledge and a mover of economic plants in the age of empire has been well documented in various sources.70 However, the significance of the Wardian case has received little specific attention. Following the invention of the case, it is estimated that in just 15 years William Hooker, the director of the Gardens at Kew imported more plants than in the previous century.71 In the following decades the Wardian case continued to be used extensively. Looking at the directors correspondence at the Kew Gardens archives gives an insight into how extensive the

68 Drayton, Nature’s Government, 257.Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan “Introduction”, in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 1-16; Lucille Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 69 Daniel Hendrik, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Daniel Headrick, “Botany, Chemistry, and Tropical Development.” Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996): 1–20. Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor Getz, Empires and Colonies in the Modern World: A Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 308-9; Robert Kubicek, “British Expansion, Empire and Technological Change.” in Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III, edited by Andrew Porter and Wm Roger Louis. (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 247-269. 70 Brockway, Science; Hendrik, Tentacles. 71 William J. Hooker, Letter to N.B. Ward, 24 Jan. 1842, in Ward, On the Growth of Plants, 89.


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use of the Wardian case was from the 1860s into the twentieth century.72 Plants were travelling to and from: Shanghai, Ceylon, Batavia, Yokohama, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Trinidad, Tonga, Venezuela, Dominican, Jamaica, Guyana, Natal, South Australia, Melbourne; and in the cases were Liberian coffee, orchards, Indian ferns, tree ferns, sisal, Venezuelan and Demerara Tonga beans, mangoes and tea. The connections covered the globe and were efficient. In one letter, the collector in India, George King, noted that it was quicker to send plants in a Wardian case from Calcutta to Kew, than it was to get a case of plants from Sikkim to Calcutta.73

Figure 5: Unpacking Wardian cases at Kew, c1890. Image courtesy: Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. With all this movement there were also signs that whole environmental processes were literally being moved across oceans. Many bamboo species, after years of only vegetative growth, might have one “gregarious” burst of flowers, this often occurs every 32 years. In the early 1880s the bamboo plant, Chusquea abietifolia, was sent to Kew in a Wardian case. 74 It was planted out in one of the greenhouses. In 1884, Joseph Hooker witnessed it “suddenly burst into flower”.75 He made inquiries with colleagues in Jamaica and discovered that the Chusquea was in flower throughout the mountains of Jamaica. These specimens, that were transported to an entirely new and distant environment, flowered at the same time as their distant companions in Jamaica. In the 1890s William Thiselton-Dyer took over as director at Kew. The movement of species also slowed as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Often, as was the case with the rubber transplant, Kew took initial control of a transplant and then left the propagation and further

72 The Directors’ Correspondence, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, available through the Global Plants Database, http://plants.jstor.org/. 73 G. King, Letter to William Thiselton Dyer, 21 Aug. 1877. Directors Correspondence, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In JSTOR Global Plants. Available: http://plants.jstor.org/visual/kdcas6379?s=t 74 William Siefriz, “Gregarious Flowering of Chusquea”, Nature 165 (1950): 635-636. 75 Quoted in Siefriz, “Gregarious Flowering,” 635.


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distribution up to colonial gardens. In the decade 1891-1901, Kew moved 198 Wardian cases. The cases went all over the world, to name a few: Accra, Boston, Calcutta, Ceylon, Fiji, Hong Kong, Java Lagos, Melbourne, Natal, Penang, Sierra Leone, Singapore, St Vincent, Sydney, Trinidad. They sent on average about 20 cases per year between 1890 and 1910.76 Surprising although colonial botany was an important aspect of empire building, the relationship between botanists from different countries was largely fluid and in support of building knowledge. Kew’s work was well-known to other imperial powers in Europe. For other nations, replicating the work of Kew was an important aspect of their colonial projects. The Germans replicated the work of Kew. Their interest in Kew occurred in the 1880s. In 1887, Kew received two German visitors who were not botanists but sent by the Deutsch kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) to investigate the imperial work of Kew.77 In early 1898, the French also sent a botanist to Kew to talk to Thiselton-Dyer about their work in the colonies. Following this meeting, in September a report was presented on the work at Kew and how the French could replicate it, by January the following year the French President issued a decree setting aside a portion of the Bois de Vincennes, the largest public park in Paris, in the eastern suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne for the Jardin d’essai Colonial (later renamed as Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale).78 Many within Britain were not sure that the work of Kew could be replicated. Thomas Villiers Lister from the British Foreign Office wrote sceptically about the German botanical enterprise: “The Germans should understand that for an institution like Kew to flourish it should, like a big tree, have a very small beginning. Transplanted full grown it is not likely to succeed.”79 By 1891, to service their new colonies, the Botanische Zentralstelle für die deutschen Kolonien (Botanical Research Center for the German Colonies) was officially set up and based at the Berlin Botanic Gardens and modelled on Kew. Before it was officially set-up Wardian cases were already on the move from Berlin, the first leaving in 1889. The case was an important part of the German colonial project. The magazine Kolonie und Heimat reported that, “The first task of the [Botanische] Zentralstelle is to supply the colonies with seeds and live plants. The sending of these occurs in the so-called Wardian cases.”80 By 1910, a total of 240 Wardian cases had been sent by the Germans to their colonies. Half of these were sent to Cameroon, 64 to East Africa, 56 to Togo and 20 to the South Sea colonies. And in all these cases at least 17,000 plants were sent.81 These included plants such as coffee, oil palm, sisal, cocoa, gutta percha, rubber and bananas.

76 Compiled from, Kew Outwards Book, 1881-1895, and Kew Outwards Book 1896-1923, Kew Archives. 77 Letter German Embassy, London, to J.D. Hooker, Sept. 12 1879, in Miscellaneous Report: Germany 53, Kew Archives, p.2. See also Walter Lack. “Kew - Ein Vorbild Fur Berlin-Dahlem?”, in Preußische Gärten in Europa: 300 Jahre Gartengeschichte, 182–85. Leipzig: Edition, 2007. 78 Christophe Bonneuil and Mina Kleiches Du jardin d’essais colonial á la station expérimentale 1880-1930: Elements pour une histoire du CIRAD (CIRAD: Paris, 1993). 79 “The Germans…” Letter T.V. Lister to Thiselton-Dyer, 17 Dec. 1888, in Kew Miscellaneous Report: Germany, 53, op. cit., p.19. 80 “Der Botanische Garten zu Berlin”, Kolonie und Heimat 35 (1911) 21 May, pp.2-3, p.3. Trans. by author. 81 Figures from Otto Lutz, “Botanische Zentralstelle Fuer Die Kolonien,” Kolonie Und Heimat, 22 (1910), 2–3. Curators at the Berlin Botanic Garden and Botanic Museum give the estimate between 1891 and 1907 as 16,500 plants moved in Wardian cases, see Zepernick, “Die Botanische Zentralstelle”, 109-110; Kathrin Grotz and H. Walter Lack, “Wardsche


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The Wardian case became a point of particular pride for colonial agriculturalists. In the French Pavilion at the Brussels Exposition Universelle et Internationale of 1910, the French were able to show off the economic plant products they had sent to their colonies: “improved” varieties of cocoa, coffee, rubber and fruit. The exhibit told people that the colonial test garden in Paris had shipped more than 40,000 specimens of live economic plants. Shipments were made in the “so called Wardian cases”.82 By some estimates from the French gardens they moved between 60-100 plants per case.83 Taking the largest number, a conservative estimate would be that in the decade from its creation, 1899-1909, the Jardin Colonial shipped at least 400 Wardian cases to the colonies. Almost twice that of the Germans and certainly more than Kew over the same period. With the help of the Wardian case they transformed the agricultural pursuits of their colonies.

Figure 6. Preparing to send live plants in Wardian cases to the Ivory Coast at the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, Paris, c1900. Image courtesy Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD. Other botanical gardens played major roles in moving plants around the globe whether it was for acclimatization, commercial or ornamental reasons.84 The world renowned Le Jardin d’Essai, or Algiers Botanical Garden, was a major hub for French acclimatization and movement of plants. At Dutch gardens, including the Amsterdam Botanical Gardens and Leiden Gardens, many plants passed through on their way to Asian colonies, including cinnamon, cloves, mango and ginger.85 For the Dutch it was more the gardens at Buitenzorg, Kästen,” Museums Journal 4 (2010). See also Katja Kaiser, “Wardian case for shipping live plants, Berlin around 1900”, in German Colonialism, op.cit, p.202. 82 “Exposition de Bruxelles: Section Coloniale Francaise,” La Dépêche Coloniale 15 April 1910, p.7. 83 This estimate is documented in, Louis Vernet, “Une Visite au Jardin Colonial”, La Dépêche Coloniale, 30 June 1909, 155-166. 84 Hendrik, Tentacles of Progress. 85 Weijden, Biological Globalisation, 31-32.


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Java that was the central hub of movement.86 At Russia’s most prominent gardens in St Petersburg, the German born Carl Maximowicz became head of the botanical gardens which allowed him to develop an extraordinary array of Japanese plants.87 The United States became one the most important users of the case in the early twentieth century because of the extensive use by the United States Department of Agriculture. In each of these places the Wardian case proved an important technology for building collections and disseminating plants to other regions. These mobilities did not come without consequence. The Wardian case by its design also moved earth and environments. Hidden within the soil were things like the hammerhead flatworm (Bipalium kewense). Interestingly first found on the greens at Richmond, not far from Kew gardens. The worm is a native of Indo-China and but the first named specimen was found in London near Kew Gardens and most likely arrived in a Wardian case. It has been a common worm in greenhouses in Europe and United States since the late nineteenth century. It is also a predator of native earth worms when it takes hold in a foreign environment.88 Animals such as the worm were hiding in the soil. It was also in the period of the Wardian case that we turned to greater focus on monoculture agricultural crops, certainly a remnant of the big agricultural push of New Imperialism. Monocultures such as coffee and sugar have all suffered from invasive plant diseases being sent in Wardian cases. The sugarcane mosaic virus and coffee rust are two examples that were found in cases and have devastated crops. In the twentieth century people did not turn away from monocultures but instead looked to quarantine and control the movement of species. Shipping live plants, in particular soil, was one of the first practices to be heavily regulated in the early twentieth century. On the other hand, the Wardian case was used by entomologists to transport insect species that could act as natural predators of plants and animals. In 1911, R.S. Woglum of the USDA filled a Wardian case of live plants in India with live specimens of the small beetle E. lahorensis a “natural enemy” to the white-fly.89 In 1925 the Wardian case was again used to move insects. This time the Cactoblastis moth that would eat the invasive prickly pear. And in the ever increasing complex ecological worlds the case transported both invasive species and potential biological controllers.90 By the 1940s, with increasing quarantine restrictions particularly on soil, the use of Wardian cases was largely phased out and the last journeys carrying ornamental plants occurred in 1960. The case was superseded by the use of polythene bags and temperature controlled air transport. 86 Eugene Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1880-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Although Buitenzorg was run by the Dutch, it was a key place where German botanists trained. 87 Rosenberg, “Transnational Currents”, 909. 88 LeighWinsor, Peter M. Johns, and Gary M. Barker, “Terrestrial Planarians (Platyhelminthes: Tricladida: Terricola) Predaceous on Terrestrial Gastropods”, in Gary Barker (ed.) Natural Enemies of Terrestrial Molluscs, pp.227-278 (CABI: Wallingford, UK, 2004). 89 M. Rose and P. DeBach, “Citrus Whitefly Parasites Established in California,” California Agriculture July-August (1981): 21-23. 90 Jodi Frawley, “A Lucky Break: Contingency in the Storied World of the Prickly Pear,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 28, 6 (2014): 760-773.


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Artefact of the Anthropocene?

Figure 7. Wardian case, from the collection of the Berlin Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum, on show in Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (Deutsches Museum, Munich, 2014-2016). Photo courtesy Deutsches Museum. For many historians the Anthropocene has become widely accepted as a versatile concept. 91 In short, the concept suggests that the impact of humanity upon the planet has become so great that we are now creating our own geological age. It helps to explain both the post-1950 phase of the “Great Acceleration”, that is characterised by steep rise in population, human consumption and production, but also a longer period dating back to colonial periods and the beginning of the industrial revolution where many processes have their roots.92 From within the humanities there has been many different perspectives, one focus has been on the materiality of the Anthropocene.93 As such, it has inspired museums and artists to work with the term. Recently the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, one of the largest science and technology museums in the world, opened the major special exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands. Within this exhibition the Wardian case appeared as an important object displaying human influence of planetary mobility patterns.94 Curators often remind us that a focus on artefacts and objects can yield interesting stories for out histories. By their practice with objects curators show that “material display of objects can

91 Helmuth Trischler, “The Anthropocene: A Challenge for the History of Science, Technology, and the Environment,” N.T.M. 24 (2016), 309-335; Libby Robin and Will Steffen, “History for the Anthropocene”, History Compass 5, 5 (2007): 1694-1719; Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin, and Paul Warde (eds.), The Future of Nature: Documents for Global Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 92 Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 842-867. 93 Author 2014. See also Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero and Robert Emmett, Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 94 Nina Möllers, Christian Schwägerl, and Helmuth Trischler (eds.), Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (Deutsches Museum: Munich, 2015); Author, 2015.


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foster conversations about living in times of rapid environmental change.”95 The Wardian case is one such object that is not only worthy of display in the Anthropocene exhibition, but also worthy of consideration by historians. Boxes and cases quite literally moved environments. One of the systems that humans have exerted large influence over is the movement of plants. We now move more vascular plants than any other process or species. Our ability to move live plants successfully and on a large-scale was aided in no small part by the Wardian case. As a box the Wardian case also helps us to shift some of our focus toward both material histories and complex stories of mobility. In this broad review of the Wardian case an attempt has been made to show its extensive use across the globe by many different groups of people: scientists, horticulturalists, nurseries and agriculturalists; as well as the many different plant species being moved: cinchona, tea, rubber, bananas, orchards, and even beetles. “Historical knowledge may prove more, not less, important in the future,” noted ecologist Higgs; and the historian Robin has also suggested that “There is a new role for geography, history and all the humanities in understanding the global environment”.96 When shifting the focus of studies of the Anthropocene to occur in a transdisciplinary dialogue, artefacts and history help to locate different stories of global change.97 The Wardian case is but one of these artefacts that has a compelling environmental history.

95 Author 2014, p.2. See also Jennifer Newell, Libby Robin, and Kirsten Wehner, Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2017). 96 Higgs, “A Tale of Two Natures,” 293; Robin “Resilience in the Anthropocene,” 60. 97 Frawley and McCalman Rethinking Invasion Ecologies.
