5 ideas for bottle gardens with orchids

A bottle garden with orchids can be quite an eye-catcher! What exactly you need to look for when keeping orchids in a closed terrarium, we have already discussed in the article about bottle gardens with orchids. Today, we're going to take a look at five beautiful specimens and use them to gather a few ideas of our own to perfectly showcase such beautiful flowers as orchids!

By the way, here you can find beautiful examples of jars for a closed terrarium.

Orchid in focus

If you already plant orchids in a closed terrarium, you certainly want to present them as beautifully as possible. They are not called queens of flowers for nothing. User Bonsai Babo has placed his pink Phalaenopsis orchid here nicely in the center and decorated the rest of the bottle garden appropriately.

This is still a very small, young Phalaenopsis orchid, but it will grow much larger later. As you may have read in the article about orchids, there is no known maximum age for orchids. One day it will fill much more of this glass.

To do this, the bottle garden was equipped with a false bottom and several layers of substrate. At the top there is a layer of gravel and also two moss cushions. The moss could be the common white moss, which is very popular in modeling. We have also talked about this before in the article about moss for closed terrariums.

On a silver plate (kind of)

What you don't often see in closed terrariums are pots. But right here a pot was used to make the orchid stand out in particular. Was it necessary? No. Does it add a special touch? Absolutely!

The pot gives the closed terrarium its own unique flair. It literally speaks, "This terrarium belongs to this orchid, and ONLY to this orchid!"

The rustic look, overgrown with moss, goes great with the dark leaves of the orchid. This one accents the top with its yellow petals. At the bottom of the jar, the light-colored gravel adds another accent. I personally think this bottle garden is a great success, even though (or maybe because) it is so unusual. The use of a pot inspires me for my own future terrariums.

Bottles full of orchids

With these three beautiful specimens, it is important to note that they are not classic closed terrariums or bottle gardens. As you can see, they are open at the bottom and are therefore not a closed ecosystem with the three known cycles. As a source of inspiration, though, they're all great!

The focus here is clearly on each individual orchid. After all, there is almost no space left in the bottles. This makes the orchids themselves appear a little larger than they actually are.

Such bottles are perfect to put on shelves, as you know, for example, in a bar. Of course, you need to make sure that the plants get enough light. This could be achieved either with a window or grow lights. With Grow Lights you could put the orchids in the spotlight again, if they are the only things lit up in a dark room.

All three bottles seem to use no substrate. This is not surprising, as it is well known that orchids can grow epiphytically! If the term doesn't ring a bell, you might want to revisit the article on bottle gardens with orchids. Instead of substrate, the plants here were stabilized with moss, which looks very nice and airy.

As a pair of twins

This bottle garden is again a little wider and thus provides enough space for two orchids and many more plants. Here you immediately get quite a tropical feeling.

Although this glass is much more overgrown than the previous bottle gardens, where the orchids were definitely the focus, these two orchids do not get lost here. Their super pink color stands out among all the green and creates a visually beautiful contrast that is an absolute eye-catcher.

Here, substrate was used again, because most epiphytic orchids can also grow terrestrially. But this is only possible if the substrate is really resistant to compaction.

In a bell

This one is admittedly more of a jar idea, but I thought it was too pretty not to include in this collection of ideas. Again, this bottle garden with orchids is very overgrown. But this time the orchids don't have a super flashy color and are white instead.

Instead, they stand out from the thicket of plants by their size and the multitude of flowers. The mosses and plants around them serve as a visual cushion and make the glass bell appear very densely overgrown and filled.

The wide bottom of the container makes this closed terrarium seem almost like a piece of ground you would have cut from the tropical rainforest and brought home.

Summary

Hopefully you were able to gather some inspiration for your next closed terrarium from this collection of ideas. Orchids are beautiful flowers in their own right, but the right presentation completes their appearance. Now you know you can put your orchids in the center all by themselves, in a double pack, or maybe even in a heavily overgrown bottle garden. By the way, I have often used the terms bottle garden and closed terrarium in this article. To find out if the terms are equivalent and what was said long before them, see this article.

If you want to know what other plants are viable for closed terrariums, I recommend this article here.