The terrarium makes a comeback

Former florist Ken Marten has given up cut flowers. Now he is bringing houseplants back into our homes via the Victorian terrarium.

Ken Marte with a terrarium he is making
Set dressing: Ken Marten puts his design skills to good use in his terrariums, mingling fossils and found objects with houseplants Credit: Photo: Martin Pope

Ken Marten is serious when he says that he wants to change the way we look at houseplants. He thinks indoor plants have been edited out of our homes and we’ve lost interest in growing them, but is backing a strong hunch that they might be on the verge of a comeback: “It’s all about gardening – but indoors,” he says. He has left a safe job in difficult times to launch a new company, and he has more ideas for his fledgling business than you can shake a fern frond at.

His new company, Hermetica London, is poised to send a blast of fresh air through a floristry trade stuck in cut-flower stasis. Five years of working for McQueens, the top London florist, saw him decorating hotels such as the Connaught and the Grove. It has been a second career: he started out in the film industry. “I had an aptitude for model-making and started out with a small film company in Wales doing the special effects for videos and films,” he says.

Marten later moved to London to do the same kind of work – set design, making theatre props. It gave him a grounding in problem-solving and making things, plus the freedom to explore ideas which didn’t have to have sensible limits. In fact, they often projected pure fantasy.

However he took a break from film, returning to his native Wales, which is where he discovered floristry. After earning an NVQ, he quickly began to win prizes. “I wanted to explore the idea of containers which could be beautiful empty, then become something different when they were filled with plants,” he says.

The move back to London followed soon after. At McQueens, his ideas had to be tempered by commercial reality, but he brought something extra to his work because of his film background. “I always saw floristry as a kind of set dressing – I thought about the room as a whole and how to stage the flowers in that space,” he says. Most of his colleagues had been trained only in traditional floristry techniques, so he had an edge. “Because of my background I’m quite fearless – I dare to go where other people might be afraid to.”

The modern houseplant

Early in 2012 Marten felt that he’d taken flowers as far as he could. Contemporary statements of glamorous stems in sculptural vases left him cold. He longed to work with material which was “alive not dying”.

The idea of creating hip terrariums for the modern age had been knocking around in his mind for a while. In the United States and Australia, indoor gardens, terrariums and interior landscapes have been coming back into fashion for a while. Exponents include the artist Paula Hayes, who makes installations using glass vessels and plants. These, says Marten, “straddle art, landscaping and product design”, while American companies like Slug & Squirrel make small terrariums from found glass objects.

There are also hints of a revival in Victorian interiors at the moment, with fossils, natural history specimens and objects of “curiosity” in the mix. Even “brown” furniture has been rehabilitated. It was hints and cues like these which brought Hermetica London into being.

However, Marten still has to battle for hearts and minds. For all kinds of reasons, many of us have given up growing indoor plants. It seems the Seventies and early Eighties was the last time we thought seriously about terrariums and houseplants. Back then, everyone aspired to have green plants in their homes. It was a time of white-painted brick fireplaces with baskets of ferns inside, or 6ft-high palms beside the open-tread pine staircase. Large recycled glass demijohns planted with succulents or African violets were a popular addition to stylish interior shots. Green plants worked with the newly fashionable “country” look, all that pale wood, macrame pot holders and Laura Ashley “spriggery”.

Marten’s many trips to Holland as a professional florist had showed him that fantastic indoor plants are available, but many of them we never see in this country, so sourcing good material can be hard. The one plant many people do have indoors is the indestructible phalaenopsis orchid. Trouble is, as their popularity has soared they have become too familiar. Offerings from the British wholesale market are often dull, though a few garden centres are more adventurous. For many gardeners, houseplants can also mean serious guilt if they die slowly before our eyes, even if they cost less than a bunch of flowers. We feel more comfortable with cut flowers, knowing that they are bound to die and can be thrown out.

Marten gardens and knows his plants but he says there is a risk that horticultural know-how can be inhibiting. “In a way, I need to forget what I know about gardening and start again from scratch to free up the possibilities,” he says. He thinks we should all be braver in our plant choices and resist always buying the easy option: “Buy something beautiful and delicate and exotic, be prepared for it to die eventually but enjoy it for the time that you have it. You can always compost it if you feel guilty when it has to go.”

A glass act

Originally terrariums came from a period when plant hunters transported living specimens thousands of miles home. They provided a self-sustaining mini-environment in which moisture created by the plants collected on the inside surfaces of the glass and dripped down to replenish them. Wardian cases (named after their inventor the botanist and entomologist Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward) became a way for wealthy Victorians to display plants indoors, especially in cities where pollution made gardening difficult. It is possible, but rare, to find examples of these at fairs and boot sales.

Fortunately, Marten has found a company still able to make glass terrariums. Conveniently near to London, in Billericay, Essex, Glass from the Past will be making containers for Marten’s projects and hosting workshops where people can learn to make a terrarium.

“It’s a cube with a corner missing, basically. You see it as a cube but if you just tilt it on its side it transforms it. It’s amazing how something so simple can have such an entirely different effect. We’ll do a 7in cube for the workshops so it’s easy to take home afterwards when it’s filled with plants.”

Marten is also working with a designer to make a contemporary “Wardian case with a twist”, including LED lighting. He says: “It will function as a table but there will be a garden beneath you and you’ll be able to place it where you wouldn’t normally put plants.”

Other ideas come from the possibilities offered by electronics and lighting. These open the way for some extraordinary effects. Why not make a narrow vertical display case or vitrine which doesn’t take up much space, planted and hung on a wall? Ken wants to experiment with displays which shift with time, slowly and almost imperceptibly, or maybe with faster-growing roots suspended in a liquid medium that change almost daily. Who isn’t fascinated by the roots of a hyacinth bulb growing into a glass jar?

Containers don’t have to be made for the job though, you just need an eye to spot the potential of things you come across. For a recent window display in London’s West End, Marten used groups of old laboratory glasses, bell jars and flasks combined with small succulents, skeleton plant stems, fossils and more, making an extraordinarily detailed still-life. It caused many a preoccupied pavement-focused walker to stop and look up in wonderment at a fragile natural world of living green, caught and surviving among the city glass, steel and concrete.

Visit hermeticalondon.co.uk. Follow @oscarsinteriors on Twitter for news of a project with interior design shop Oscars.

Terrariums by Hermetica will be on show at the Garden Museum, London SE1, from April 8 in the Floriculture exhibition (Feb 14-April 28). Ken Marten will speak at an evening event on April 12. For tickets see gardenmuseum.org.uk.