Bring nature indoors, with less effort
Bringing a little more nature indoors through Terrariums and Paludariums, Custom Terrarium Commissions, and Specialty Plants.
Our growing collections of living botanical decor is designed to bring nature indoors in easier, more manageable ways.
What we're about
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Based in Durban, the nature brand is based on intentionally-designed, ecology-led terrariums and commissions.
Our aim is to connect with nature indoors, and our offerings aim to promote and/or support visual calm, indoor greenery and a personal connection with living nature.
The brand mission is to guide everyone to bring living nature inside their home and work spaces in manageable ways that suit the new owner. Living systems can be accessible and easy without years of experience or educational knowledge.
So whether you are starting with your first easy-care plant or designing your dream ecosystem and aesthetic with a custom terrarium, our approach stays the same:
Offering intentionally designed living botanical art, living systems and indoor greenery into spaces with less effort, hassle or necessary expertise or knowledge.
We are a local, indoor-nature brand on a mission to help everyone bring a little more nature indoors.
Through Terrariums, Paludariums, Plants & Botanical Displays we design, build and plant our offerings to replicate realprocesses, because nature has a way of changing how a space, and often also the person, feels.
A room feels softer with something living in it. A desk feels less sterile. A shelf, windowsill, entrance, or quiet corner can feel calmer, softer, and more alive when nature is brought indoors with care.
the guide to easy indoor nature
What we offer
The Bottled Garden offers curated indoor plant, terrariums, paludariums and living systems designed to bring nature into homes and workspaces without the effort.
We exist to help people bring nature indoors through thoughtfully selected plants, terrariums, paludariums, commissioned botanical designs, curated plants and related consumables, tools and accessories.
We also specialize in terrariums, and develop more information and practical guidance for our customers and enthusiasts, so that makes living botanical features and displays become easier to enjoy and simpler to understand.
So whether you are starting with your first easy-care plant or designing your dream ecosystem with a custom terrarium commission, our approach stays the same: to offer indoor living terrariums and indoor nature displays that are international created to as easy as possible to care without becoming unmanageable or intimidating to keep.
Where we began
The Bottled Garden began with a simple idea: to find ways to connect more everyday people with real nature by helping bring more living, self-contained ecosystems into indoor spaces where they live and work.
What started with small ecosystems in glass gradually grew into something broader, as experience in immersed growth and acclimation grew, so did our plant collections. Today the studio is solely dedicated to product, propagation and designs with a total of over 100 different plant species that include indoor plants, immersed plants, aquatic plants, rare plants and plants curated to make a statement. During our evolution, natural materials and living compositions became different ways of exploring the same idea: bringing nature indoors can be beautiful, manageable and genuinely rewarding.
Today, The Bottled Garden creates handcrafted terrariums, offers commissioning curates plant collections and related products and offers Terrarium Club workshops and events, in Durban, Umhlanga and the North Coast of KZN. Each piece is approached as something living, rather than simply another piece of simple decor
Because indoor nature has a tendency to soften interior spaces as well as the people within them
Read more about How to Bring more Nature Indoors at Home and at Work
Meet the founder
The Bottled Garden was founded by Michaela Visser, whose passion for nature started to show as a student volunteering in wildlife rehabilitation at CROW, in Durban, KZN. Soon after school, she completed short courses in Limpopo followed by several years in Hluhluwe, Kwa-Zulu Natal both studying and working in the guiding industry, all stemming from an internship after school, and this background and evoluion helped shape the brand’s mission and approach to terrariums, plants and indoor nature as a whole.
The Bottled Garden brings together Michaela’s background in field guiding, ecology and conservation with, a systems-mindset and strategic business management. Since starting her observation of nature and it’s interconnected relationships, she has been driven to find ways to translate that long-standing interest in ecology, terrariums, gardening, botany and plants, and the positive impact nature has on people’s wellbeing, into , easier-to-maintain, more accessible and less hassle solutions to bring real nature indoors.
Her workshops combine design with ecological understanding: guests learn how their build actually works and leave with the terrarium that’s their own design and setup to thrive over time. She prefers guests to make their own aesthetic choices practical guidance for keeping the finished terrarium healthy.
Her story begins long before The Bottled Garden did.
Read the founder story → (COMING SOON)
