INDOOR FLORICULTURE: THE WORLD HISTORY OF ORIGIN

Abstract

The history of indoor floriculture dates back to ancient times. Already in Ancient Greece, temples and houses were decorated with both bouquets of wildflowers and flowers grown in flowerpots for the spring festival of Adonis. Images of potted plants have been preserved in ancient frescoes. In China, people knew how to grow bonsai more than a thousand years ago. Ancient manuscripts describe how to grow spicy plants in pots from seeds. The first winter garden in Europe was created in the 13th century by the outstanding gardener Albert Magnus in honor of the arrival of the Dutch King William in Cologne. Soon, all European monarchs began to build winter gardens. Such gardens were called greenhouses, as the most common plants in them were oranges. Initially, greenhouses had a purely utilitarian meaning: they grew exotic fruits and preserved tropical plants in winter, which decorated palace gardens in summer. Botanists of those times were tasked with bringing back new exotic plant species from expeditions. This not only led to the discovery of new plant species, but also contributed to the development of natural sciences. With the beginning of the era of great geographical discoveries, many previously unknown species of exotic plants came to Europe, and European botanists were able to study and describe new plant species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the profession of a collector – a collector of plants unknown to science – became popular. Collectors traveled to different habitats of unknown plants and described them. The first book in English about indoor floriculture, The Garden of Eden, was published in 1653. Plants began to decorate living rooms in wealthy homes. For the majority of the population, indoor plants became available only in the middle of the XIX century. Modern botanists are already trying to radically modify flowers, and they are succeeding. Perhaps, over time, modern methods will also go down in history, where it will be indicated that several centuries ago, by trial and error, breeders managed to grow some extraordinary plant.