In a small store window in downtown Tacoma, Washington, there’s an unusual landscape. Strewn across hot white sand like abandoned objects on a Star Wars planet sit a Bulbosa airplant, lime-green moss, and a large quartz crystal. Nearby is a tiny forest, with lush ferns, lichen, lemon-y Scotch moss and, arching over everything, a curly ram’s horn. As in, from a sheep.
It’s the window of Moss + Mineral, a design store/art gallery where Tacoma artist Lisa Kinoshita has lately discovered the old-fashioned art of making terrariums – tiny gardens inside glass containers. Only she’s giving them a spin that 19th-century indoor gardeners would never have thought of.
“Terrariums are becoming trendy,” says Kinoshita, “but today’s terrariums are more personal and even contemplative, encapsulating not only plants but moments in time, like mementos.”
For Kinoshita, though – a mixed media and jewellery artist who creates exquisite necklaces out of scarab beetle shells or philosophical installations from taxidermy – those mementos take her terrariums to unusual places. Amid tiny spring flowers and ivy she might place a porcelain Chinese baby doll, looking like a bizarre giant amid the plants.
An airplant might be tucked inside a shell, creating an alien octopus sprawled on aqua glass rocks. Fuzzy cacti might share space with a deer jawbone, emerging from the soil like the myth about dragon’s teeth. A martini glass might sport a nubby succulent lounging under a paper cocktail umbrella. Plants live with enormous pink barnacles, driftwood, mirror shards.
And then there are the containers Kinoshita uses. Moss + Mineral focuses on mid-century design like teal 1970s chairs and 1950s footstools, so most of the terrariums live in vintage glass vessels: golden-brown rectangles, huge goblets, discs like the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington.
It’s gardening done by an artist. “I take a different approach than a gardener would,” Kinoshita explains. “I look at plants as raw material, rather than a garden. Terrariums are art and landscape, a diorama. You’re creating a microcosm – it has a really evocative quality.”
Landscape designer Sue Goetz agrees. Down at The Urban Garden Company, also in Tacoma, she sells plenty of terrariums, plus unique glass containers she finds to put them in, and unusual plant specimens. “It’s like a mini-landscape without the plot,” Goetz says. “Terrariums are hot right now. We sell a lot to people who want a garden on their desk, if they’re stuck in a cubicle or a high-rise.”
Like Kinoshita, Goetz gets creative with what she puts in her terrariums. Right now she loves old glass lampshades she finds and tall glass lanterns that can hold a pot on a dish. It’s a handy trick for enclosed terrariums, where water evaporation and condensation can drip onto the glass bottom rather than the soil, avoiding mouldy, soggy plants.
Other terrariums in her shop include big Mason jars, claw-footed glass bowls, foot-high Victorian greenhouses, and tiny glass teardrops that can hang by the window with an airplant inside. She even loves the finicky work of pruning with special, long-handled terrarium tools that she buys or makes.
“It’s therapeutic to sit and trim,” Goetz says with a smile, adding that it’s also a good idea to trim a plant before you put it in the terrarium.
Her biggest caution? Don’t over-water. But if your plants do die, it can help if you’re looking at the terrarium as art.
“It’s trial and error,” Kinoshita says. “You start out with inexpensive plants, group them for similar needs and put them out of direct light or heat. And if they die, you just put them on the compost heap and feel better about it.” – The News Tribune/Tribune News Service
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