Terracotta Pot

True-ish Tales of Gardening Implements

Pot Plant! You’re back!

I love that you’re always travelling - moving from family to friends, country to city, indoors to outdoors. It’s quite surprising, considering your natural tendency to put down roots and stay firmly grounded. I’m left wondering, how did such an unlikely nomad catch the travel bug? 

Queen Hatshepsut was a female pharaoh and imperial influencer. She was also a woman with a plan (and a beard, but that’s another story). It was the 1490s BC and we all know that Myrrh resin was trending heavily in the Egyptian scene in those days. They couldn’t get enough of the stuff. It was a crucial ingredient for perfume and medicine, not to mention a party-mixer for white wine spritzers. But the travel delay on myrrh orders from Yemen was preposterous.  Enough was enough. 

So the Queen proposed an outrageous plan that had never been done before. Why not just bring the plants from their home soil and raise them on the palace grounds?  

She ordered the delivery of 31 trees and left it up to the Royal Botanists to sort out the logistics.  And they did. Their ingenious design could hold a single plant, together with its soil, in a convenient, transportable container.  Imagine that!  For millennia thereafter it was known as the Terracotta Pot (which quite literally meant 'baked earth’ ).  

And that, my friends, was the first known trans-plant and dare I say, the beginning of the botanical backpacker.