I built a terrarium.

It started as a side project, something to do with my hands when the news got too loud, having sat in a terrarium workshop run by Katrina Whitehead. But as I layered charcoal over stone, soil over charcoal, and placed the moss like a quiet little crown, I realised I wasn’t just making a miniature garden. I was building a world.

And not just any world – a heterotopia. A real place that holds something unreal. A space that doesn’t follow the same rules as the one outside. Like a pocket of possibility hidden in plain sight. A jar on my shelf that gently says: it doesn’t have to be like this.

In this sealed glass container, the usual logic of the Anthropocene doesn’t apply. There’s no domination. No extraction. No endless “growth”. Only exchange. Evaporation becomes condensation. Light becomes energy. Death becomes nutrients. Everything gives something back.

When I built this terrarium, I was trying to make something pretty. But what I ended up with was political. It was a form of radical ecological action – quiet, yes, but firm in its refusal. A refusal of waste. Of speed. Of monoculture. Of the idea that we can fix the climate with more tech and more control.

This little ecosystem doesn’t need managing. It needs noticing. It asks me to slow down. To mist instead of mow. To observe instead of interfere. I don’t own this thing. I tend it. I listen to it. I check for mould like someone checking for omens.

And in doing so, I unlearn a little. I let go of the myth that nature is somewhere out there. Instead, it becomes something I collaborate with – even if it’s inside a reused glass jar on a rainy windowsill in Yorkshire.

Foucault called heterotopias counter-sites. Places that mirror the world but also invert it. My terrarium is exactly that. A micro-resistance. A slow poem in green. A tiny rehearsal for something better. Maybe not the revolution, but a sketch of one.

So yes. I built a terrarium. But more truthfully, I built a world – one that reminds me how much can thrive in stillness, how much can grow in glass, and how much is possible when we choose to care.

The main plant is a Fittonia and I admit I popped too much moss in the top.