Dish Gardens 101: History

Now that we know what a dish garden is, where on earth did the idea come from originally? Did someone in ancient history think it might be a good idea to pull perfectly good plants out of the ground outside and bring them inside to keep alive? Did it have to do with an early attempt at "wintering over" a favored plant? Did someone simply want to make the indoors more beautiful and thought, naturally, that plants would be the way to do it?

Read on to find out the answers!

Beginnings

Gardens are as old as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon, and Persia. Formal garden styles, using ornamental plants as part of a landscaped and well-tended area, started with walled gardens in Egypt and graduated to terraced gardens in Mesopotamia and Babylon. In India and China, a more organic, naturalistic style became most popular.

Next Steps

Japanese architects, designers, and gardeners picked up the naturalistic style from the Far East and, according to Questia, "elaborated it into a distinct style of highly disciplined arrangements of plants and their settings with the object of achieving subtle beauty based on economy and simplicity."

In other words, the Japanese really refined and perfected the simple, natural style they learned from China and India. The goal of Japanese garden work was to create simple designs that mirrored the ordinary beauty of the natural world.

Further Design

From larger landscape design, Japanese artists started to create their simple, natural landscapes on a much smaller scale.

Enter the bonsai, a practice of cultivating dwarf trees begun more than a thousand years ago in Japan. Small trees or woody plants were (and continue to be to this day) planted in small containers, and then pruned and carefully shaped to maintain their miniature size. Maintaining such a plant is truly an art form: those who have mastered the techniques can manipulate the plant stems, stalks, and leaves to create the most realistic representation of the natural world possible.

The End Result

Japanese gardeners began to recreate miniaturized versions (much like the small bonsai) of their larger landscape designs in small containers with groups of plants to show what their full-scale designs would look like. The simplicity and "indoor garden" style of the small-scale versions caught the attention of Europeans and others traveling through Japan, and the practice spread outward as people returned home with the idea to plant their own tiny gardens.

Hence: the rise of the dish garden.