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    Creative Terrariums: 33 Modern Mini-Gardens for Your Home
    Creative Terrariums: 33 Modern Mini-Gardens for Your Home
    Creative Terrariums: 33 Modern Mini-Gardens for Your Home
    Ebook499 pages2 hours

    Creative Terrariums: 33 Modern Mini-Gardens for Your Home

    By Enid G. Svymbersky

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    About this ebook

    Modern apartment dwellers who want to enjoy green growing things often lack the space for a garden. But if you have any room at all you can create a beautiful terrarium! This book shows how to build and maintain unique mini-gardens full of lush, oxygen-boosting plants. Craft blogger Enid Gonzalez presents 31 cutting-edge, contemporary terrarium designs that will add a decorative organic presence to even the smallest room. Each imaginative project features inexpensive materials, common plants, and step-by-step building instructions. Creative Terrariums also includes expert advice for terrarium maintenance, making it the indispensable reference for this satisfying and sustainable hobby.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFox Chapel Publishing
    Release dateJan 25, 2021
    ISBN9781607656401
    Creative Terrariums: 33 Modern Mini-Gardens for Your Home
    Author

    Enid G. Svymbersky

    Enid G. Svymbersky is the creative blogger behind A Charming Project (acharmingproject.com), a DIY style website where she shares her passion for crafts, plants, and renter-friendly DIY. She first started crafting as a creative outlet, and soon became hooked on blogging when her Coffee Pot Terrarium project went viral. Between brunching and happy hour, you can usually find her planting, hot gluing, or painting her next project. Newly married, she lives in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Michael…and in the near future, a dog named Waffles.

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    Book preview

    Creative Terrariums - Enid G. Svymbersky

    INTRODUCTION

    I grew up in a not-so-bad, but also not-sonice, part of Los Angeles. Describing it as concrete jungle would be putting it mildly. Trees, hedges, and flowerbeds were practically nonexistent in my neighborhood. That is, until you reached my house. Picture a perfectly manicured lawn, multicolored rose bushes and hydrangeas, and an incorrigible rubber tree that needed pruning all the time, not to mention a ginormous avocado tree in the backyard that could be seen from the street threatening to devour the power lines. The neighbors hated us. They lived in constant fear that our trees’ roots would crack their precious concrete. They were a constant nuisance to my parents. On the flip side, we frequently had strangers knocking on our door asking for avocados and growing advice. These were more our type of people and I always watched my grandparents or parents (depending on who was home) invite them inside. The inside of our house was no different from the outside. My grandmother’s devil’s ivy (Epipremnum aureum) grew rampant all over the living room. In true jungle fashion, it trailed up the walls and around the perimeter of the ceiling in the most breathtaking way. Anyone we invited into our home was instantly fascinated by our wacky way of life.

    Illustration

    Always chasing greener pastures, I attended UC Davis, a school known for agriculture and its arboretum that spans more than 5,300 acres. To this day, I have never lived on a greener patch of heaven on earth than during those years. If I was better at math I would probably be telling you about my days learning about chemistry and botany, but instead I was most at home at the school’s craft center. In exchange for free classes, I volunteered to check out tools to the woodworkers, sell clay to the wheel throwers, and set up the chemical baths for the photographers. This is when crafting and making things with my hands really became a passion for me.

    Years later, I decided to do what everybody does when they have a passion for something: I started a blog! Living in Los Angeles again, and working a 9-to-5 job, I needed a creative outlet. I was fortunate to find an online community of crafters and plant enthusiasts who felt the same way I did. Then opportunity struck—not for me, but for my husband. He was offered a great job in the San Francisco Bay Area, so we immediately packed our bags and moved . . . into a 130-square-foot room while we figured out where to live. I very quickly realized that I had never been so devoid of greenery in my life. How could we survive six months in a boring, confined room like this? To bring a little life to the place I started creating mini aeriums (air plant terrariums) and succulent terrariums. No clear container was safe from me! I used whatever I could get my hands on: glass jars, bowls, plastic bottles . . . I even transformed our mini coffeepot into an air plant terrarium (see here). I thought it was the sweetest little thing, and I couldn’t just keep it to myself. I decided to post the picture on my blog, and, before I knew it, it was all over social media. That moment of creativity born of my desperation for some greenery in my life is how I came to write Creative Terrariums.

    IllustrationIllustration

    I would love to share your finished terrarium designs! #creativeterrariumsbook

    Maybe you picked up this book because you live in a small apartment and feel that a terrarium would be the perfect complement to your space, or maybe you love the challenge of a good DIY project with your kids, or maybe you’ve killed one too many houseplants (it’s okay, we’ve all been there), and now you’re ready to give terrariums a try!

    In these pages you’ll be introduced to 33 step-by-step terrarium projects featuring cacti, succulents, tropical plants, mosses, and air plants, to get you started. You will learn everything you need to know to choose the right vessel, foundation, plants, and decorative elements to confidently bring your own mini landscapes to life. You will learn how to identify symptoms of illness and methods for saying buh-bye to unwanted pests. We’ll also cover general care tips and techniques to maintain your terrarium.

    Whatever the reason behind you holding this book in your hands, please know that I’m beyond humbled, and I sincerely want to thank you for joining me on this adventure. I wish you lots of fun and happy plant memories ahead.

    —ENID

    Illustration

    You will learn how to identify symptoms of illness and methods for saying buh-bye to unwanted pests.

    THE WARDIAN CASE

    A HISTORY OF TERRARIUMS

    I’ve heard of some fanatical obsessions sweeping a nation but none of them can light a candle to the 19th-century Victorian infatuation with ferns. In fact, the compulsion ran so deep it was given a name, Pteridomania (pterido being the Latin word for fern, and mania, well . . . you can guess). Ferns were so much a part of Victorian life that fern motifs were printed on every decorative façade imaginable: buildings, fences, furniture, pottery, tea sets, clothing, and even tombstones donned the fronds. Fern fever even offered young women a little social independence. During this era, it became perfectly acceptable for women to explore the outdoors on fern-hunting expeditions, sans chaperone! As you can probably imagine, the boys were not too far behind. Over the years, these social occasions reportedly led to many a fern-induced love affair. So just how did this frenzy take over an entire nation?

    Illustration

    Wardian Cases

    Illustration

    Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791–1868)

    Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a London physician and nature enthusiast, could not for the life of him keep his ferns alive. He yearned for an indoor garden but the increasing smog from industrialization and the infamous London fog proved to be less-than-ideal conditions—until one day, to his utter amazement, he found a young fern growing inside one of his sealed jars. Dr. Ward discovered that the fern thrived in a closed and humid environment. This observation piqued his interest, so to conduct further experiments he called on a carpenter to build him a small airtight greenhouse made of wood and glass. This Wardian Case, as it would eventually come to be called, is how the first terrarium of the modern era was born.

    Illustration

    Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

    —James Baldwin

    Dr. Ward shared his findings with his friends in the botany community, and before he knew it, fern fever was in full swing. Wardian Cases were manufactured in all sizes, from small portable cases for the amateur home collector to giant life-size versions called ferneries. Most significantly, Wardian Cases were instrumental in transporting live specimens across long ocean voyages. Thousands of Wardian Cases were used to import live tea trees from China to England, and we all know how much the Brits love their tea! Rubber trees were fetched from Brazil, which led to a prosperous rubber industry that played a crucial role in both World Wars.

    However, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and by the beginning of the 20th century the popularity of ferns dwindled and was subsequently replaced by orchid fever. Dr. Ward was certainly not the first person to invent the science behind a terrarium, but he certainly championed the cause and made plant collecting more accessible to the masses. In the end, what I find so remarkable is that all of this was born from nothing more than a little fern in a jar.

    According to the American Fern Society, today there are over 10,000 species of ferns. Ferns are common enough that they are readily available for purchase at most garden centers and even farmers markets. In parts of the southern United States, Kimberly queen ferns adorn entranceways and Boston ferns hang from porch baskets. In New England, fiddlehead ferns are harvested in the spring and then cooked and served as a delectable regional specialty. With the popularity of terrariums on the rise, ferns are once again making their way under glass enclosures for our viewing pleasure!

    Illustration

    A hanging Boston fern.

    HOW A TERRARIUM WORKS

    WHAT IS A TERRARIUM?

    Terrariums are an eye-catching way to bring the whimsy of nature indoors. These mini indoor gardens are a great way to maximize space while adding a touch of greenery to your home. The conventional definition of a terrarium is a self-sustaining living ecosystem inside a sealed glass container. The high humidity inside an airtight container provides the right conditions for many tropical plants to thrive in your home all year long.

    While there are some extraordinary exceptions, terrarium displays are not forever. Even with regular pruning and maintenance, plants tend to outgrow their containers and need to be repotted into larger containers. This means you get to go out and buy new plants for a new display, and that can be really exciting!

    Take into consideration that not all plants can be kept under glass and not all species can be planted together in a terrarium. Tropical plants are best suited for closed containers while succulents, tillandsias, and cacti need the airflow that an open vessel provides. While not all the terrariums in this book are conventional terrariums (in fact most stray far off the beaten path), it’s important to understand some fundamental workings of a biosphere to really appreciate how amazing it is to cultivate life under glass.

    Everything happening inside a terrarium is a miniature representation of all the amazing phenomena we experience in our own natural world. I’ve found that having some knowledge of plant biology is very helpful in maintaining healthy plants indoors. While we all learn about photosynthesis and the water cycle in grade school, I thought a little refresher would be helpful.

    Illustration

    Carbon Dioxide (CO2) + Water (H2O) + Sunlight = Sugar (Glucose) + Oxygen (O2)

    PHOTOSYNTHESIS

    Plants create their own food through a process called photosynthesis. In the Greek language, photo means light, and synthesis means to combine. Plants combine water and carbon dioxide and use the energy from the sun to create their food. Plants have tiny openings in their leaves called stomata which open to collect carbon dioxide from the air. The water molecules from the roots and carbon dioxide from the leaves are then transported to the plant’s chloroplast cells where sunlight is collected. Here food is created for the plant in the form of sugar (glucose). Oxygen is a byproduct of this process (it’s lucky for us that it is) and at night the plant releases oxygen into the air through the process of respiration. Because it’s not polite to disturb plants during respiration,

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