The Bottle Garden – A Rainforest for Your Home

Yes, you can. A bottle garden can essentially exist autonomously for decades and only requires daylight, with no other external additions. Once you have set the ideal amount of water in the bottle, water, gases, and nutrients regenerate themselves in the amounts needed to sustain life inside the closed bottle.

That’s the theory, but how do you set up a bottle garden correctly to create a functioning ecosystem? First, you need a large glass bottle or another airtight glass container. The larger the container, the better, because even though the plants are small at first, they will grow magnificently under the optimal conditions inside the glass. This also makes it necessary to limit yourself to just a few plants.

Clean the bottle thoroughly, preferably with boiling water, to ensure that no pathogens or mold spores can harm your plants. Now, add about 2 cm of clean decorative gravel or expanded clay, like the kind used in hydroponics, to your glass bottle. This will create a drainage layer and prevent the soil from rotting.

Next, carefully add a 3-5 cm thick layer of fresh garden soil to the bottle. Try to keep the bottle clean during this process. A paper or plastic funnel can help keep the neck of the bottle free of dirt.

If you want to be extra cautious, you can boil the substrates in an old pot before adding them to the bottle to ensure that no plant diseases can take hold.

Now you can move on to planting your bottle garden. It’s important to first choose the right plants. They should be small-growing, healthy, and free of parasites.

Since particularly exotic plants from the rainforest thrive well in the conditions of a bottle garden, you can choose from small-growing bromeliads such as Catopsis nitida, Cryptanthus warren loosei, or Cryptanthus bivittatus. Among the smaller ferns, Aglamorpha heraclae mini, Aplamorpha meyeniana mini, Asplenium daucifolium, and Davallia fejeensis are particularly worth considering. Small orchids, such as the white-flowering Aerangis citrata, Aerangis rhodostricta, and the pink-flowering Ascocentrum pusillum, or the multicolored Haraella odorata, are also excellent choices. Decorative mosses and a branch of the popular Bubiskopf can make beautiful ground cover.

For the first few days, you should control the water level so that dew is visible on the bottle in the morning, but the walls should dry out during the day. If the biotope becomes too moist, leave the bottle open until the moisture level is right. After that, it’s sufficient to regularly check the health of your plants.