The year 1833 is an auspicious date for lovers of plants and gardening.

This is when the first experiment testing a Wardian case occurred.

Two wooden boxes carrying ferns and grasses travelled from London to Sydney on the deck of a ship.

Amazingly, the plants survived the six-month journey, where previously they would have perished.

The experiment revolutionised the transport of live plants around the globe.

As a result, mangoes, orchids, roses and rhododendrons were able to make the journey to Australia and take root in gardens and as crops.

The impact of the Wardian case is still felt today — and its legacy is complex.

"The Wardian case is one of a set of key tools of globalisation, for better or worse," says environmental history professor Stuart McCook, from the University of Guelph in Canada.

"The plants it moved around the world have fed people, have provided people with livelihoods, have helped grow national economies.

"But on the downside, they have perhaps allowed for colonialism to flourish, have helped move devastating crop diseases and pests."

An accidental discovery

Luke Keogh, an expert on Wardian cases, describes the device as a "greenhouse in miniature".

"This greenhouse is made of timber and it has a sloping roof and inside the roof are glass inserts," he says.

The case was invented by English physician and amateur naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward.

Like many revolutionary discoveries, this one was accidental.

An accidental experiment with a glass jar led to the invention of the Wardian case. ( Supplied: Loraine Callow )

In 1829, Dr Ward found a chrysalis in his London backyard and put it in an enclosed glass jar to observe what it would become.

But when he noticed small plants growing in the base of the jar, he changed the nature of the experiment.

He decided to test how long plants could survive in enclosed jars with no additional water.

Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward never registered a patent for the Wardian case. ( Supplied: National Portrait Gallery, London )

He ran successful experiments for four years before approaching prominent nurseryman George Loddiges with his discovery.

Together they designed a miniature wooden greenhouse and set out to test whether their design would protect botanical cargo on a voyage to Sydney.

Two cases were packed with plants and set upon the deck of a ship.

They were opened only once during the voyage.

Upon the ship's arrival in the antipodean colony, the ship's captain, Charles Mallard, wrote to Dr Ward with news of success.

"You will, I am sure, be much pleased to hear that your experiment for the preservation of plants alive, without the necessity of water or open exposure to the air, has fully succeeded," he said.

Previously, botanists and gardeners had believed plants needed to be exposed to fresh air on long sea voyages.

Flower fever

A gardening craze in the 19th century, propelled by the expansion of the middle classes, drove the desire for ornamental flowers like rhododendrons, orchids and camelias.

Nurseryman George Loddiges, a friend of Dr Ward, was one of the first to recognise the commercial application of the Wardian case.

"Almost immediately he put into motion 500 cases, which is a huge sum," Mr Keogh says.

The Wardian case changed the world, allowing live plants to be transported around the globe. ( Supplied: Missouri Botanical Garden )

The cases were also used extensively by botanic gardens and European plant-hunters.

The plant-hunters travelled to many countries including China, Tibet, Sri Lanka and Japan, returning with ornamentals that were propagated in nurseries.

In Australia, nurseries promoted "new and rare plants carefully packed in Wardian cases".

When a humble English primrose arrived in Melbourne in the 1850s, packed in a Wardian case, 3,000 people came to witness the event.

Such was the throng of enthusiastic admirers, the police were called to create an orderly passage for the delicate flower.

Edward Hopley's A Primrose From England shows the reception the flower received in Melbourne. ( Supplied: Collection Bendigo Art Gallery )

Tansy Curtin, who has authored a book on the floral history of Australian art, explains the excitement over the flower in terms of its symbolic significance.

"This can be seen as a very symbolic gesture in terms of Australian history — that idea of the primrose representing this new life, this new world in Australia and all that it brings," she says.

"But also a flower such as the primrose that is native to England represents the might of the British Empire to be able to transport something from England to a new land."

Its Melbourne reception was reported in England and British artist Edward Hopley painted a grand narrative of the event, with a central Madonna-like figure admiring the blooming flower, surrounded by the different social classes of the colony.

The painting, The Primrose from England, 1855, now hangs in the Bendigo Art Gallery.

A symbol of change

Alongside the spread of ornamentals, Wardian cases were critical in the establishment of plantation crops including tea, quinine and rubber.

For Mr Keogh, the Wardian case is a symbol of global environmental change.

"Humans are the largest mover of vascular plants on the planet," he says.

"Humans have control of moving plants more than any other process: more than the wind, more than rivers, more than the sea."

Mark Nesbitt, an economic botanist at Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, says the case had real impact — and not just on plants.

Mark Nesbitt says the Wardian case was an important tool which transformed landscapes around the world. ( Supplied: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew )

"If you look at the modern world around us and what made it, what made income disparities between countries, the lifestyles of different peoples, the landscapes around us ... much of that can be traced to the 19th century," he says.

"It's a time of real globalisation of human impact with the Wardian case as a major driver of that.

"So if you're interested in the effects of plantation agriculture on landscape, on the peoples who were moved around the world to provide the labour force for plantation agriculture, if you're interested in invasive plants, if you're interested in the ornamental plants, then you need to understand the 19th-century history of the Wardian case."

End of the journey

But after a century of widescale use around the world, Wardian cases were phased out.

Mr Keogh says there are two reasons for their demise.

One was the recognition that the cases were introducing invasive species and disease.

"The very principle of the Wardian case is that it's a microenvironment, so it's not just plants that are moving," he says.

"In the 1930s they start to notice that the Wardian case is moving many things that we don't want."

Orchids were among the exotic flowers transported around the world in the case. ( Getty: Suhaimi Abdullah )

The other reason for its demise is that innovations in international transport surpassed the need for the Wardian case.

"A technology moving on a boat is much slower than how they do it today — pull the plant out of the ground, wrap it in plastic and FedEx it wherever it needs to go," Mr Keogh says.

Today, there are only about a dozen known original Wardian cases left, mostly held by Kew Gardens in London.

In Australia there is just one, owned by the Waroona Historical Society in Western Australia.

Its president, Debra Tyler, says that after the case was used at Hamill Nursery, West Australia's state nursery, it was transformed into a dog kennel.

"We believe here at Waroona, Western Australia, we have the only example in Australia of an original wooden Wardian case," she says.

"A lot of people are surprised when they find out what it actually is."

Waroona Historical Society in WA owns the only known original Wardian case in Australia. ( ABC: Dee Salmin )

It's now been restored, although still bears the marks of its life housing canines.

'He believed it could help people'

Despite the extensive use of Wardian cases around the world, its inventor did not benefit from its success.

Dr Ward outlined his scientific observations about his invention in his 1842 book On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases, but he didn't register his discovery as a patent.

"He felt it was part of his service to science, and his service to the community to teach people about this box. He believed it could help people," Mr Keogh says.

In a letter he wrote in 1866 to the American botanist Asa Gray, Dr Ward said he would do it again.

"Thirty-three years have elapsed since my first cases arrived in New Holland," he wrote.

"I have never received the slightest acknowledgement or thanks from any public body in this country.

"But were my time to come over again, I should do precisely as I have done considering that my life, though one of constant labour, has been one of great delight."