Gardens in a bottle

Trends

It was an unseasonably hot Saturday in April, and the three dozen terrariums on display in a booth at the Brooklyn flea market were sweating, the moisture turning into beads on their glass containers. Katy Maslow and Michelle Inciarrano, who were selling the miniature gardens, answered questions from passers-by. An antique magnifying glass sat nearby, for those who wanted a closer look.

The two friends, who spend most of their weekends “antiquing and junking,” Maslow said, use repurposed vessels like old apothecary jars, cake stands and decanters to make the terrariums, which seemed at home among the vintage furniture and clothing and artisanal food at the market in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Inciarrano, a 33-year-old photography student, was the one with the green thumb, who suggested they fill their finds with plants and figurines, said Maslow, 31: “I had not thought of terrariums once in my whole life.”

But in less than a year the pair had created so many, each working in her Brooklyn home – Inciarrano, in the Marine Park apartment she shares with her husband, and Maslow, in the bright, modern two-bedroom she owns with her siblings in Midwood – that they decided to sell them, calling the enterprise Twig Terrariums.

Long a fixture of elementary school classrooms, terrariums have recently begun gaining favour with young design enthusiasts and creative types. But today’s look nothing like the fish tank structures and kitschy miniature greenhouses that were popular in the ‘70s.
These terrariums marry the current rage for Victoriana with the growing interest in handmade crafts and all things do-it-yourself. Add to that a touch of locavore fervour, as more urbanites take to terraces and fire escapes to grow flowers and herbs in pots.
Grace Bonney, the founder and editor of the blog Design Sponge, said she gets inquiries about terrariums – how to build them, where to buy them, which plants work best – every day. In her own home, she has three.

Doesn’t need gardening know-how
Part of the appeal of building a basic terrarium is that it does not require a great deal of gardening know-how. While regular house plants can demand considerable attention, terrariums offer a bit of nature – and the sense of calm it can confer – in a contained, easy-to-care-for way. And once a closed terrarium reaches a state of equilibrium, in which there is neither too much moisture in the container nor too little, it can more or less sustain itself.

Smith-Wattley, a fashion stylist for the website Bluefly, said she came up with the idea of making terrariums when she was searching for centerpieces for her wedding, held last September.  The leftover materials from the wedding became the terrariums she sold at the flea market, under the name New World Terrariums.  She now makes them for events too, and sells them through a store called Task in Williamsburg, creating compositions in containers she buys from suppliers in the flower district, Target and T J Maxx.

The artist Paula Hayes, on the other hand, could be considered the high priestess of terrariums, having elevated them to objects of art with her exquisitely cultivated creations in custom-made, hand-blown glass vessels. 

Describing them as “primordial,” she theorised that terrariums appeal to the human desire to nurture living things. A YouTube video of Tassy Zimmerman, owner of a store that sells terrarium, demonstrating how to make a terrarium has been viewed almost 24,000 times since it was posted on Design Sponge; by comparison, Bonney said, the average video on the site that is not part of an ongoing series garners about 10,000 views.

Zimmerman said she had a handful of customers who had been inspired to hold terrarium-making parties after watching the video on Design Sponge, buying soil, charcoal and rocks in bulk. Flora Grubb, a landscape designer who owns the 28,000-square-foot nursery Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, said her average terrarium customer is a little younger than her typical client, and is not generally an avid gardener. “It’s a design-y set,” Grubb said. “They are interested in plants from a design standpoint, not a horticultural standpoint.” Many are drawn in by the creative aspect – deciding whether to make a tropical terrarium, for example, or one of “the really artistic terrariums,” she said, which “take an artistic hand to make.”

Hundreds of terraniums
One of Grubb’s customers, Katie Goldman Macdonald, 26, is a women’s apparel designer for Old Navy with a special fondness for succulents. Macdonald grew up around plants – her father has a master’s degree in botany – and has made around 100 terrariums over the years. She has sold about 40 of them in the past eight months, she said, and posts pictures of them on her website, botanyfactory.com.

Macdonald has her ovoid glass containers hand-blown in Oakland, Calif., and builds her terrariums in her plant-filled studio apartment in the Mission District. Her sleek creations, filled with the architectural, slightly alien shapes of her succulents, would not be out of place in a room furnished with midcentury modern pieces.

She described making a terrarium as a sort of science experiment, albeit one conducted with colour, texture and visual composition in mind.

Macdonald initially made some terrariums to sell at a craft fair at work, figuring that her colleagues, who are “obsessed with aesthetics,” she said, “would be fascinated with having beautiful arrangements in their home that they can look at and not have to do much to.”

That is one of the main draws of terrariums, she said: They are good for people who love plants but do not actually enjoy gardening.