SOUL COLLECTIVE

Soul Collective Terrarium Night — August 20, 2025

ALLWOOD, Toronto

A terrarium is not about plants. It is about patience, silence, and the unseen geometry of care. To sit before glass and sand, roots and stone, is to create a world in miniature — a vessel that asks for presence, not performance.

When Zelia first suggested the night, I resisted. I thought: too quiet, too still. Where was the rhythm, the pulse of a gathering? But when the vessels appeared on the table, lined and waiting, something shifted. The air became charged with another kind of music.

Nan Oldroyd, Chief Experience Officer and founder of NANO PEOPLE Consulting, and her husband Dr. David Oldroyd, Senior Advisor of Borregaard Norway, took their places across from one another. In silence, they began: lifting succulents from soil, shaking sand from roots, pressing them into new formations. It was like watching a ritual — a choreography of patience.

Nan’s terrarium moved like water and air, black and white sands flowing in undulating motifs. David’s, which he named Dune, was breathtakingly simple — natural sands in precise layers, evoking horizon and heat, a fractal Sahara contained in glass. Later, he leaned back with a smile: “This was better than a couples massage at the Four Seasons.”

And then Zelia, our host, revealed her creation: a vortex. Neither water, nor fire, nor air — but motion itself, spiraling, drawing the eye inward.

The evening held its own history. Terrariums trace back to 1829, when English botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward discovered that sealed glass jars could form self-sustaining ecosystems. His “Wardian cases” allowed fragile plants to cross oceans, including the cinchona tree, source of quinine — the first true treatment for malaria. Without it, colonization of Africa would likely have faltered. A delicate art, shaping worlds in glass, once changed the fate of nations.

At ALLWOOD, the gesture continues in a different register. Each terrarium sold, each night shared, sustains the My Jamaica Heaven Fund — dedicated to building schools and sanctuaries in Jamaica, where children, especially those with special needs, can thrive in environments as carefully designed as these small worlds of sand and green.

From vessels that once carried survival across seas, to vessels that now carry hope into the future, the circle remains unbroken.

One Love,
Linton