A Sealed Garden That Was Watered Once in 53 Years (2017)

[phillc73]

After initial transportation failures, sealed terrariums were used by Robert Fortune to send stolen tea seedlings from China to India,[1] thus helping the British to break the nineteenth Century Chinese monopoly on tea production.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00H9J1AM2/

[bjackman]

I wonder if part of what makes it work is luck of the draw wrt. the microbial life that was present at the start. You need stuff that will break down the dead plants at a good enough rate but nothing that competes for resources or produces anything toxic to the plant. Or maybe that's a typical microbial makeup for sample of gardener's compost?

[psadri]

I tried this myself and can attest that it worked for at least one year. I basically grabbed some dirt + a ground cover type plant + some water and sealed it in a large glass bottle (1 gallon glass milk jugs work too). So I don’t think you have to be that lucky.

[comboy]

Negative feedback loops?

[vvdcect]

Yeah I don't know if you noticed the white patch on the lower part of the terrarium, that to me looks like a mix of the plants root system and mycorrhizal fungi, so there should have been microbes present within the soil when it was first planted.

[oarfish]

> In fact, more than a century has passed and David’s sealed bottle garden is still thriving and robust as can be.

I'm not sure the author knows what a century is.

[noonespecial]

53 Years. Almost certainly meant to include the word "half".

[fxleach]

Came here to say that as well.

[chadcmulligan]

Any one know what sort of jar that is? and/or where to buy one?

Edit: its called a demijohn if anyone else was curious, used for making wine

[pbhjpbhj]

They're also called, or very similar to, "carboys". Google says they're called "jimmy johns" in USA, but I've no knowledge of that.

[Insanity]

Thanks! I was curious about that myself. They seem quite pretty and a nice size for an 'experiment' like this.

[audiometry]

Are there any canonical guides to building a jar-rarium? Lots of crappy YouTube videos but nothing very thorough and complete.

[AKifer]

Did anyone try introduce an animal in such a closed system, insects for instance. Does it self sustain ?

[m-i-l]

I saw a shop selling these once: https://www.ecospheres.co.uk/ . They contain small marine shrimp, and "The only care the sphere requires is a source of indirect natural or artificial light" and they "have an average life expectancy of 2-3 years however it is not uncommon for them to survive for 7 to 10 years"[0].

[0] https://www.ecospheres.co.uk/what-is-an-ecosphere/

[dmux]

On a larger scale, wouldn't this be Earth?

[grey413]

It's pretty normal to introduce springtails (small arthropods) to sealed terrariums. Their main purpose is to to eat mold, but they presumably also help with the carbon cycle.

[aidenn0]

How about humans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[jedberg]

Yeah, my brother did this. He made a self sustaining garden with some bugs in it. The bugs eventually stopped reproducing, possibly because of inbreeding? The plants lasted quite a while until my parents moved and couldn't take it with them.

[Frenchgeek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosphere_(aquarium)

[julienreszka]

I just don't think there is enough evidence to believe his story.

[nkrisc]

Based on my layman knowledge of the relevant scientific fields here, it certainly seems plausible. He's not claiming anything that extraordinary. The stakes are also incredibly low, it's not like he's lying about his achievement to get some kind of grant.

[reaperducer]

People have been building terraria for centuries. You can buy all shapes and sizes in stores, some with fish. Though the fish ones probably don't last after the fish dies.

Gardening is one of the many areas of life where the best information and the bulk of information is offline.

[jedimastert]

I mean, sealed terrariums are and have been a known thing for a long time. If you look more into it, 50 years doesn't seem all that implausible. To me, the most amazing part is keeping something around for that long.

[whenchamenia]

You are correct, but there is very little incentive to lie. Maybe a helpful family member watered it a few times and never mentioned it. The concept does at least work for a few years as many sources can confirm, and the story is firmly in the plausible range imho. But in typical fashion, the data is scant and maybe contradictory.

The point on HN seems to be; the takeaway, arguing grammar/numbers/journalistic standard, and cooler-topics recently, and this has all 3. (Hyperbolic comments too, in case the /s is not autodetected by the content-bot mentality)

[hairytrog]

I'm thinking we each make our own little ecosystem, maybe a half an acre would be enough. Maybe make it double walled, just in case, and then say screw it to everyone else as climate change and various other big things occur on the outside.

[wongarsu]

You might be interested in Biosphere 2 [1], a 3 acre hermetically sealed dome stucture designed to house about 8 people with an ecosystem to provide them with everything they need to survive.

They didn't quite get oxygen and food production to the required level, but if you add another acre or so it should work. With renewed interest in moon and mars colonies somebody is bound to revive that line of research.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[m-i-l]

I've a vague fantasy about returning to the remote Scottish island where I was born, which is pretty windswept with almost no trees, and building a house and garden inside a large Solar Dome, growing trees and plants that otherwise wouldn't survive in such a hostile environment. Apparently it has been done to some extent[0]. Side note - they discovered in the Biosphere 2 that trees need some wind, because the stress helps form reaction wood to strengthen the tree[1].

[0] http://www.solardome.co.uk/case-study/the-nature-house-north...

[1] http://awesci.com/the-role-of-wind-in-a-trees-life/

[p1necone]

The gun turrets on the roof that keep away the roaming marauders need to be self sustaining too.

[stephen_g]

It would get too hot in most places, I think. Glass, especially if double walled, stops the heat getting out, but most of the heat from the sun will be able to get in (as infra-red). So you'd need supporting systems (i.e. air conditioning) outside.

[pugworthy]

Have you ever watched Silent Running?

[blackflame7000]

The movie Biodome comes to mind here.

[Doubl]

I wonder what other life forms are inside that jar apart from the plant. Is the tiny sealed world a paradise or a hell for them?

[vvdcect]

If the soil was taken from the garden there should be hexapods within it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springtail

[pvaldes]

I'm sceptical about the sealed part.

Anybody having Tradescantia fluminensis knows that is a very easy plant to grow. It stores water in its stems so is relatively dry resistant, but it grows unlimited unless you clip it. So either there is some kind of autoprune system in the bottle, or somebody is opening the seal and clipping it. In that case there is a external source of water in the air in form of vapor.

> Did anyone try introduce an animal in such a closed system, insects for instance. Does it self sustain?

Unlikely with this species. Most animals are unable to eat it. In any case this is closer to a monoculture than to a real ecosystem between one plant and some fungus (needed to remove the dry parts and stems if we assume that there is not human intervention to clean the surplus).

[tombozi]

It's not a miracle, it's self-sustaining. Mine has been going strong for 1+ year now. I got it here: https://www.ferrarium.nl/

[oftenwrong]

Can plants be used to clean pollutants from the atmosphere in a space station?

Maybe not:

https://www.gardenmyths.com/garden-myth-born-plants-dont-pur...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/indoor-p...

[ehnto]

Cody's Lab recently put together a sealed terrarium meant to emulate the conditions of the Carboniferous period, and although it's going to be slow going I am still excited to see how it progresses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgAbxP9SHQY

[stcredzero]

There should be more funding and research on self contained, or nearly self contained ecosystems. The cost is modest on the larger scheme of things, but the potential benefits in the next half century could well be tremendous. Also, doing such research here on Earth may well save the lives of many pioneers in the coming decades.

[yitchelle]

If there was a plant that is not green, would it have last as long? Just wondering if the photosynthesis is only exclusive to green plants.

[rolleiflex]

There is nothing specific about green. Chlorophyll A and Chlorophyll B have different absorption spectrums. Depending on the specific combination of those two, the plants can appear in a different colours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll#/media/File:Chloro...

There are other pigments that cannot photosynthesise on their own, but can pass the energy to chlorophyll to react, as well. So while green usually means photosynthesis, absence of green does not mean absence thereof.

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/glossary/gloss3/pigments.html

[YayamiOmate]

What other plants are there? Photosynthesis is performed in/by chlorophyll which is green, so it's hard to not be green.

There is a puprle earth hypothesis and Haloarchaea, which is based on witamin A related molecule for photosythesis, but those are not classified as plants.

The current theory for inception of plants is that one cell captured another chlorophyllic one and created symbiotic organism, which later evolved into multicelluar plants. So by definition plants should be green for phototrophy ("feeding on light"), until it would somehow evolved chlorophyllic cells, but ot seems they are older than plantae themselves.

Btw. similar theory exists for mitochondria and eukaryota, that's why we speak of my mitochondrial DNA.

[xixixao]

We made these at work couple years back, I have a nice red leafed plant in it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nw3yxphorc2h9v1/PHOTO-2019-04-26-1...

The only thing that almost killed it was direct sunlight, I think it got too hot and all the moisture was pulled out to the top.

[ainiriand]

It is not exclusive to green plants. You can see the cercis canadensis for example, not sure how it is done though.

[tempodox]

I have to try this. Maybe I'll finally get a plant to survive longer than a year in my burrow.

[Nanocurrency]

Definitely adding this to my DIY list. I need to build myself a terrarium now!

[pvaldes]

Is not so easy and stable as you could think. The trick there is in the species, that is a survivor, clonates itself from tiny fragments and is invasive.

[chrismeller]

So then I’m the only one who did this in elementary school, then?

Soil from the yard, a couple of plant clippings, water... and seal it. I find it kind of surprising how excited the comments here are when 7 year olds around the world have done this same experiment.

[lqet]

Very cool! However, I found this remark strange:

> some like Bob Flowerdew (organic gardener) thinks that “It’s wonderful but not for me, thanks. I can’t see the point. I can’t smell it, I can’t eat it,”.

What kind of an argument is that?

[drinane]

It would be cool if that was for an apartment