I’m writing this as the rain lashes down outside – again – but it’s not, as the title might suggest,  a post about how to manage a flooded garden, instead it’s another one about water gardens, but water gardens with a difference.

While there’s a long history of water gardens in virtually every country across the globe virtually all of them were, until quite recently, outside in the open air.

If you think about indoor water gardens you probably imagine fountains, basins and goldfish, perhaps in a Victorian conservatory or a Georgian grotto. I bet you didnt think much about water plants and what place they might have, so  today’s post is going to look at aquatic plants indoors in what might be called the dawning of the age of aquaria…

Gardening indoors with water plants is a comparatively recent development that really only started in the mid 19thc, after  an eccentric English natural historian  Philip Henry Gosse began experimenting with what he originally called   an aquatic vivarium” or “aqua-vivarium” for all sorts of aquatic life including fish and plants.

However,  indoor ornamental fish-keeping in Britain is a much older phenomenon, dating back at least to the mid-17th century. In his diary for 28th May 1665 Samuel Pepys reports “Thence to see my  Lady Pen, where my wife and I were shown a fine rarity  of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so for ever; and finely marked they are, being foreign.”

These were probably goldfish  brought in by East India Company ships from China.  Of course we  now know that water plants are necessary to provide oxygen and food for any fish but Lady Pen and Pepys didnt, so how long those fish lasted in such restricted conditions and without any plants  is anybody’s guess.

There are, however, a few images which show similar things but no sign of  much that we’d recognise as aquatic plants for almost two hundred years.

The big breakthrough seems to come around the 1840s when Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward [ about whom I’ve written before] was experimenting with his closely glazed case – better known these days as the Wardian case.  His initial interest was in using it for growing ferns but when he finally got round to publishing his ideas in 1852 he suggested that if the case was large enough “British or Tropical forms of vegetation, fish and birds, and other animals, might be introduced to enliven the scene.”

This followed on from  his experiments ten years earlier keeping fish and plants “in a large earthen vessel, given to me for the purpose by my friend Mr. Alfred White.”

This “vessel contained twenty gallons of water, and in it I placed ten or twelve gold and silver fish, in company with several aquatic plants, viz. Valisneria spiralis, Pontederia crassipes, Papyrus elegans, and Pistia Stratiotes, which plants, by means of their vital actions, as had long been well known, maintained the purity of the water, and, as in the atmosphere, kept up the balance between the animal and vegetable respirations. Placed in the centre of my fern-house and nearly surrounded by rock work (rising five or six feet above the margin of the vessel, clothed with Adiantum and other lovely ferns, and partially overshadowed with the palmate leaves of Corypha australis, the plants and fish continued to flourish for years…

My friend, Mr. Bowerbank, always alive to scientific inquiries, followed up these experiments with equal success, but substituted stickle-backs and minnows for the gold fish.”

From a scientific point of view Ward’s case was vastly superior to any bowl or vase  previously used but keeping fish and water plants were secondary to its main purpose, and didn’t immediately catch on.

However the year before Ward published his book, Robert Warrington, one of the founders of The Royal Chemical Society,  had published the results of his experiments with fish and water plants. His  Notice of Observations on the adjustment of the relations between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, by which the vital functions of both are permanently maintained showed how underwater plants give off oxygen and when they are added to a container are able to support fish and other aquatic life, providing the balance of plants to other life is in harmony.

Warrington’s experiments started  in May, 1849 with “two small gold-fish… in a large glass receiver of about twelve gallons capacity, …and some eel-grass or Vallisneria .” All went well until the plant’s leaves started to decay and Warrington realised he needed to introduced “a useful little scavenger” the water snail to eat the debris. In time the snails laid eggs which the goldfish ate, and soon the community was well-balanced and thriving.

It wasn’t long before it was realised that rectangular glass tanks rather than large pots or bowls would be even better scientifically, because the flat glass sides allowed an undistorted, direct horizontal view of the  entire contents of the tank. This meant that the underwater world  of plants, fishes and invertebrates and way they interacted could now be seen, admired and and recorded.

Now I need to introduce another element into the discussion because I’m sure you’ve been thinking everything so far has been about freshwater fish and environments. But in fact alongside all this, as early as the 1790s there was a successful attempt to set up  a series of indoor marine environments in glass jars. Edinburgh based Sir John Graham Dalyell  sent one of his servants down to the local beach several times a week with a jug to bring  seawater tback so he could  change the  water in all his  jars.  He claims to have kept some specimens of sea anemones alive for as long as 20 years.

Dalyell  wrote about this in Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland [1847-8] and  The Powers of the Creator. displayed in his Creation [1851-58] and there is another account of  his  methods in an article in The American Naturalist, for 1876.

Londoner, Mrs. Anna Thynne did much the same thing   following a sea-side holiday in Devon in 1846. But she didnt need to change the water because she  added plants including living corals and sponges  having realised that they helped aerate the water. The following year she put her marine aquarium  on public display at Westminster Abbey where her husband was the Sub-Dean.

If you want to know more there’s an interesting biography of this little-known female scientist Theatres of Glass: The woman who brought the sea to the city by Rebecca Stott, 2003.

 

These early efforts soon paled into insignificance.  At the Great Exhibition in 1851  there was an extravagant  display of the first  tanks with flat plate glass sides held in cast iron frame. Two years later the  ‘Marine Vivarium’ or what was soon known as the Fish House opened at London Zoo. It was masterminded by Philip Henry Gosse and  featured many of these glass tanks which allowed  visitors to see life under the water really for the first time. Over the next twenty years or so other aquariums opened in Britain, Europe, and the USA.  There’s a detailed  account of how and where he collected his specimens and the long and often acrimonious disputes with the Zoological Society of London at parlouraquarium.org.uk

Gosse is an interesting if somewhat bizarre character. Although he was born in Worcester in 1810 he spent his early working life in mundane jobs in various places in Canada and the United States, but  also exploring and recording local natural history in his spare time. When he returned to Britain in 1839 he published  his Canadian Naturalist the following year   which his biographer says shows his “practical grasp of the importance of conservation, far ahead of his time.

Gosse continued writing about natural history and experimented with keeping marine life indoors in small glass tanks  at his home at Ilfracombe. There, in 1853, he wrote A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, a book which became an early driving force behind one of those wonderful crazes that like pteridomania swept through all ranks of Victorian society: the aquarium. Indeed it was Gosse who coined the very word “aquarium” based on  the term “vivarium” – a tank for keeping small land creatures, although he originally thought of using the terms “aquatic vivarium” or “aqua-vivarium”.

We might wonder why and what was so special about this one book to cause so much excitement. The answer is actually obvious but only to the modern eye. What happened under water  had previously been largely hidden and unknown.  There was no way of seeing under water, so although obviously some fish and other creatures and some water plants were known no-one had much idea of how they behaved, and of course no-one really knew what happened under the sea or deeper fresh water unless you had were able to use one of the new-fangled diving bells.

Now Gosse showed how exotic and different aquatic life was,  and demonstrated how it could be captured and put in a tank. Suddenly life in rivers, ponds and lakes could be marvelled at – and so could the even stranger world under the sea – and it could be in your living room!

Gosse  followed his success with by a flurry of other books  about aquatic life and ways to discover it and keep it indoors including The Aquariums  An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Water.  In it he tackled how to explore and keep marine life in captivity – and that definitely included plants too.  If keeping freshwater aquaria with the plants and fish alive was complicated, keeping sea life alive was almost infinitely more difficult and so Gosse worked with Robert Warrington  on the design of tanks, and how to create ad sustain lasting underwater communities.

If you read his books today although the language is somewhat stilted to the modern ear he manages to convey the excitement of studying living creatures rather than examining dead specimens in museums or laboratories. Perhaps equally important was his artistic skill because he provided his own artwork much of which was in vivid colour and a great improvement on the usual run of book illustrations.

However, as is so often the way, the founder of a new fashion doesn’t always benefit from its success. Gosse underwent a religious conversion, eventually joining  the Plymouth Brethren, where his new fervour  diverted his energy from natural history to fundamentalist opposition to Darwin’s theories of evolution.    If his story sounds vaguely familiar then you may have read Peter Carey’s prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda, published in 1988 in which the character of Theophilus Hopkins  is based on that of Gosse.

In 1856 our old friend Shirley Hibberd joined in the excitement too. His Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet  showed how keeping water life, including plants was  “a triumph of art acting as the handmaid of science.” , although by then he thought  the novelty of the underwater theatre had subsided,   probably because it was too difficult for most people too manage.

Others thought differently.  According to the Rev John Wood  author of  The Fresh and Salt-Water Aquarium of 1868 “A complete aquarium mania ran through the country…shops were opened for the simple purpose of supplying aquaria and their contents.

 

Front of that commercial queue was  William Alford Lloyd who opened a shop in Clerkenwell  “selling everything relating to aquaria” in July 1855 and the following year opened “The Aquarium Warehouse” Portland Road, Regent’s Park not that far from the zoo where Gosse had built the Fish House.

He published a 160 page well-illustrated catalogue in 1856 for which he charged a shilling. He offered a large range of tanks of all kinds plus everything else you could possible want – and more – including pages of listings of marine and freshwater plants.

Despite the abolition of the Glass Tax in 1845 these early glass  tanks were expensive and fragile and for those For those who couldn’t afford them it was suggested that glass bell-jars such as used for covering melons or other tender garden crops could be used upside down  to bring “the Aquarium within the means of the humblest student or poorest school-master”.

The  craze received more boosts with the opening of more large public aquaria with Gosse supplying marine plants and other sea-life to  the Surrey Zoological Gardens [which I’ve written about before] and later to  the  huge new  aquarium at Crystal Palace.  Because there were so few specialists in the field  Alford was also asked to help build a large  aquarium in Paris in the Gardens of the Society of Acclimatisation.  It looks though as if he overstretched himself and in 1862  went bankrupt and moved to Hamburg where he employed his skills constructing another new aquarium which followed a series of articles  in the early 1850s in  Die Gartenlaube (The Garden House) : Der Ocean auf dem Tische (The Ocean on the Table).  and Der See im Glase (The Lake in a Glass).

The Hamburg  project must have restored Alford’s  fortunes because by 1869 he was back in London overseeing the building of the  Crystal Palace  aquarium which when it opened in 1871 was the largest in the world.  It had 60 tanks and contained 120,000 gallons of seawater which was brought in by train and then circulated via a steam-driven  system via vast underground reservoirs. Although it was destroyed along with the palace, the remains of those reservoirs can still be seen.

By this stage aquaria had  become a world-wide phenomenon, but I don’t want to get too sidelined into their history when my intention was to explore underwater gardening but since I’ve deviated rather more than slightly and have run out of time and space,  that will have to wait until next week.

For more information, apart from the links above, good places to start are the very readable and well illustrated The ocean at home : an illustrated history of the aquarium by Bernd Brunner, 2005; and the following websites: the Parlour Aquariums  which has a history of aquaria and links to books etc, and “Victorian pioneers of the marine aquarium, by Tim Wijgerde” You might also want to look at this earlier post about a particularly special more- than- aquarium.