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Bottled Greens
Delhi Times | The Times of India | Saturday, 11 June 2005

FOR ALLthose urbanites who, miss the natural greens in a garden, here is a smart option. Go for bottle plants ! whether you are aesthetically inclined or not, bottle gardens can be a source of fascination for all. Miniature landscapes in bottles, like a ship in a bottle, has intrigued many. Imagzine a miniature garden in a bottle ! And if you're the imaginative type, you could decorate this garden with boats, rocks, mirrors of pond and behold ! You'll have a scenic wonder right inside your house. Best of all you can make use these terrariums as a coffee table or dining table base and in all shapes and sizes.
Bottle gardens or terrarium are miniature, self-contained eco-systems. Once created, these closed environment can go for months unattended without even adding water: Neglect is the best method of care. They need only a little sunlight (never expose the bottle gardens to the sun for too long) and nothing else from the outside. The plants transpire moisture through their leaves, which then condenses on the glass, and flows back to the soil. This 'rain effect' allows the terrarium to go on for weeks without watering. So, there you are, it doesn't need much maintenance.

Faridabad-based Radhika Anand, who has mastered the art of bottling up gardens in small glass containers, has very recently done 10 X 2 feet bottle garden for the Delhi Secretariat. Radhika took two years to understand the concept of terrariums, and says, " I had to experiment with a lot of permutations and combinations till I got it right, and that happened some ten years ago."
Even though now, she has made this hobby into a profession, she admits parting with her work is emotionally stressful. Her own house is a gallery of bottled plants and she rarely parts with them. Commonly used plants used for creating these gardens are Poinsettia Aphelandra, Bougainvillea, Money plant, Wandering Jew, Fittonia, Peperomia, Cynthia, Drasena, Succulent, Sedum and so on. Some exotic plants like Ivy, and Nana also go into these bottled gardens. The thumrule for the selection of the plant is that they should be slow-growing plants. And, lot of people are crazy about these bottle gardens. And ready to pay any amount for them. Radhika recently did a bottle garden for someone for Rs. 3 lakh ! Radhika gives you tips on how to make a bottle garden yourself.

All you need is a clear, dry, transparent glass container with a lid.

Line the bottom of the container; about one-fifth of the container; with pea-size gravel to provide drainage for water;
You can get the gravel chips from shops that keep fish aquariums.

Make a thin layer over the gravel chips with charcoal. Charcoal purifies the air inside the container.

Use a fabric which has pores fine enough to hold soil over it so as to prevent the soil from setting down into the
drainage layer.

Sterilize the soil beforehand by making it dry under the sun and weeding out any unwanted roots. Mix some compost
manure (peat moss) with the soil in 1:1 proportion and fill about on fifth of the container; with the soil mix.

Sterilization can be done by moistening the soil mix and baking it for 20 minutes.

Select the plant which is to be grown. The plant should preferable be non-flowering. It should be adaptive to
moist atmosphere and should have slower growth. Choose smaller plants for smaller containers.

Spray water sparingly so as to moist the soil. Don't ever get soil saturated.

Cover the container with the lid and place it under bright but indirect light.

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