Hermetospheres

Experiences with plant life in closed glass containers

Category: General

  • Light conditions

    Light conditions

    This post is last of a three-part series discussing water conditions, nutrient conditions, and light conditions in hermetospheres. When I started my first hermetospheres, I intuitively felt that the place chosen within my apartment did not provide enough natural light for plant growth. I therefore installed LED grow lights, first one, then a second. Now,…

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  • A vulnerable orchid

    A vulnerable orchid

    Aerangis hyaloides is popular with orchid collectors for its lush, brilliant white flowers. For me, this was also one of the reasons to choose it for my Madagascar container. Other reasons were its small size, its supposedly undemanding cultivation and its suitable temperature, humidity and light preferences as an understory species of lowland forests. My…

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  • Unexpected guest

    Unexpected guest

    When creating and observing hermetospheres, I focus on plant life. However, one must be prepared to encounter unexpected guests. This is what happened to me once before, when a whole container was overgrown with a fungus within a few hours. With the latest guest, I got to know an entire new and extraordinary life form.…

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  • Water conditions

    Water conditions

    With certain limitations, we consider hermetospheres as closed systems. To get closer to the goal of long-term stability of this system, it is important to understand the conditions and processes within the system. They depend on the initial situation and on external factors such as temperature or light. With this in mind, this article begins a…

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  • Acclimation (1): Ficus punctata

    Acclimation (1): Ficus punctata

    Closed glass containers inevitably create extreme conditions for plant growth. This is especially the case for relative humidity, which can be assumed to be close to 100% at all times. Most tropical plants can deal with this, and hardly ever I could observe obvious changes from “normal” greenhouse conditions, where my plants usually come from,…

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  • White lines around the glass

    White lines around the glass

    Until I developed the ambition to produce pictures of my hermetospheres of a certain quality, I had no experience whatsoever in studio photography. “Studio” reads highly sophisticated, but in fact, my approach is rather simplistic. Having studied the pictures made by Ulf Soltau, I had a fairly good idea of the desired outcome, but none…

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  • Where I got the bug from

    It was in late 2020 when I came across a series of photographs published by Ulf Soltau on his own blog. They show beautifully lighted glasses with small scale ecosystems. Ulf Soltau, a biologist and book author, provides a brief but comprehensive manual on how to establish a hermetosphere that is supposed to last for…

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