A potential planter is a clear glass bottle with an opening large enough to insert a pencil.
Tall, short, square, round — the garden may be planted in an expensive antique or simply an empty perfume, medicine, or beverage bottle.
Half-gallon, gallon, and even ten-gallon jugs offer unlimited landscaping opportunities.
Having selected a bottle, these tools will help plant it:
- A funnel (small enough to be inserted in the bottleneck)
- Bamboo kabob sticks
- An iced tea spoon
- Kitchen tongs
The handiest planting aids are a pliable piece of copper wire (with a loop on one end) and a wooden dowel several inches longer than the depth of the bottle to be used as a poking stick.
Also, a bottle brush or pipe cleaners, scissors, and corks of varying sizes will be helpful.
Aquarium gravel, potting soil, shredded sphagnum moss (or strips of woodland moss), and bits of charcoal will be needed.
Patience is helpful, too.
Selecting Plants For Bottling
With the neck of the bottle in mind, select the most miniature plants you can find.
The following are suggested:
- Mosses of various kinds
- Sweat plants (various selaginellas)
- Baby’s tears (Heixine solieroti)
- Ferns (both tropical and woodland, especially Christmas and wood)
- Miniature palms
- Seedlings of hemlock, pine, and cedar
Other suggested foliage plants include the following:
- Croton
- Syngonium
- Nephthytis
- Dracaena
- Peperomia
- Prayer-plant (Maranta leueeneura)
- Chinese evergreen (aglaonema)
- Chlorophytum (spider plant).
Slips of wandering levy and philodendron may also work effectively in the planting.
Flowering plants include:
- Wax begonias
- African violets
- Oxalis
- Strawberry begonia (especially its variety `Tricolor’)
- Native violets
- Kenilworth ivy (Cymbelaria muralis)
- Miniature gloxinia (Sinningia pusilla)
- Delightful creeping perennial vine
- Partridgeberry (Mitcheila-repens), is valued more for its crimson berries than for its twin pink blossoms.
Experiment with other house plants and woodland materials. Most moisture-loving foliage plants make long-lasting bottle subjects.
Grass seeds scattered over a patch of damp moss will make a bright spot of greenery.
Also, try clover and seeds of native plants such as jack-in-the-pulpit. Bottled gardens are ideal testing grounds for last season’s garden seeds.
Before spring planting, sprinkle a few seeds in a bottle terrarium. Germination will be prompt if the source is good.
Your First Step As a Plant Bottler
The first planting step is to line the glass bottom with strips of moss.
If you have woodland moss, place the green side facing outside and let it form a cup in the bottle deep enough to conceal plant roots.
If this kind of moss isn’t available, use shredded sphagnum moss.
Dampen the moss, squeeze it nearly dry, and twist some of it around the poking stick. Then push through the bottleneck, spreading into place at the bottom.
Next, tap several teaspoonfuls of aquarium gravel through the funnel, distributing a thin layer over the bottom of the moss for drainage.
Then, fill the moss cup with soil after dropping in a few bits of charcoal to keep the bottle fresh and smell.
Unless the soil is dry and finely sifted, it will not pour through the funnel.
Another effective method is to drop small lumps of wet earth into the bottle and spread them out with the poking stick.
Now the bottle is ready for planting.
Plan your landscape carefully, contrasting leaf patterns and colors for maximum appeal.
There are no set rules for bottle planting. Poking, pushing, stuffing, shaking, tapping, tilting—anything goes!
Be sure roots are anchored and covered with moss or soil, however.
Plants may be tailored to the terrarium by trimming roots and leaves. Place the plant root in the bottle opening, then push through and into place with the poking stick.
If the bottleneck is small, it may be necessary to wash the soil from the roots. Use balls of tightly rolled wet sphagnum moss to conceal unruly roots.
Fronds of fragile ferns may break while planting, but new leaves will replace them.
Delicate plants can be wrapped in a spiral fashion in tissue paper, then dropped through the bottle opening. Remove paper with tongs.
Tap white gravel in the moss cup’s corner to accent a particular plant.
Try to be tidy, but don’t be concerned if the inside of the glass becomes dirty from planting.
Dirt streaks and moss dots can be wiped away with a bottle brush or several pipe cleaners twisted together.
Inside the Bottle, A Tiny Rain Forest
As a final chore, water the garden lightly, insert the cork, or place the lid in position, and the park is on its own.
Moisture condensing on the cool glass will drip back on the plants like rain.
The bottle needs no water, provided the inside of the glass continues to be beaded with moisture daily.
Water only when the moss becomes nearly dry. Decaying foliage indicates excessive humidity, which may be eliminated by ventilation.
Remove the cork for several hours until the bottle dries out. Light is essential to the health of bottled plants.
They need protection from the hot afternoon sun. Ferns and mosses will grow in a sunless north light, but flowering plants need south or east exposure.
Lacking window space, foliage plants will flourish under a table lamp.
What to do about excessive plant growth? Tall growing foliage may be trimmed with scissors.
Otherwise, old fern fronds and undesirable leaves can be poked loose and pulled out with a wire or tongs.
When woodland moss is used, some insect pests may hatch out.
Aphids and other unwelcome tenants may be dispatched by blowing in a mouthful of cigarette smoke and recorking the bottle for a short time.
44659 by Robert C. Baur