Ward, Nathaniel Bagshaw I Mr. Ward I, 1791–1868, botanist. Studied at London Hospital. M.R.C.S. Succeeded to his father's medical practice in Whitechapel. From boyhood had ardent interest in botany; by chance discovered principle of growing plants in glazed cases; later demonstrated value of Wardian cases in transporting living plants for great distances over long periods of time. Examiner in botany to Society of Apothecaries, 1836–54. Original member of Edinburgh Botanical Society; co-founder of Microscopical (later Royal Microscopical) Society. F.L.S. 1817; F.R.S. 1852. His name commemorated by his friends W. H. Harvery and W. J. Hooker in Wardia, a genus of South African  mosses. Author of On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases, 1842.

      "Back Street Conservatories" [II, 271–75. Dec. 14, 1850] relates Ward's discovery of the principle of growing plants in glazed cases, gives brief directions for constructing such cases, and advocates the practice of window-gardening especially among city-dwellers of "the humbler orders." The article quotes from Ward's On the Growth of Plants, which is ascribes in a footnote to "H. B. Ward." The "inventor of the 'miniature conservatory,'" states the articles, "has, we believe, received no testimonial whatever of the services he has rendered to horticulture from those who have been most benefited by the invention. he reaps his reward, however, in the consciousness of the good he had done 'in his generation,' and in the feeling that, in the homes of many, his name, associated with ferns and flowers, had become a 'Household Word.'"
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Author: Anne Lohrli; © University of Toronto Press, 1971

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography