Taking Inventory: Flower Pot

Every Minecraft home needs a garden. Relaxing in a calm, green space, surrounded by wildlife, is just the ticket after a long day down the mine. But because every player is different, every garden is different too –⁠ some are wild and untamed, some are simple and neat, some are grandiose and impressive. But in every garden there’s a place for our item of the week –⁠ the humble flower pot. 

Flower pots became a part of Minecraft in the Pretty Scary Update in October 2012, which also added some much scarier things, like witches and bats. They were originally suggested by Reddit user rapidpenguin, who also suggested item frames at the same time. A pretty good hit rate! 

They’re easy to make. Pretend you’re making a bucket, but use bricks instead of iron ingots. If that’s too complicated for you, then you can also steal one from a witches’ hut, a woodland mansion, or houses in plains, savanna and desert villages. When hit, they’ll break instantly –⁠ dropping their contents separately.

You might think that the only thing you can do with a flower pot is to put flowers in it, but you’d be wrong. You can also put saplings, mushrooms, ferns, cacti, bamboo, azalea bushes, and nether roots in there. And guess what? If “dead bush in a flower pot” is your aesthetic then you can make that happen too. Oh and fun fact –⁠ cacti or wither roses in a pot won’t hurt you, so you can have as many around as you want without fear of damage. 

Real world flower pots have been around for at least 10,000 years –⁠ we know that the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians made them, and it’s possible they were around earlier than that too.

Their original use was to make it easier to move a plant from one place to another –⁠ moving temperature-sensitive plants inside during cold weather, for example, which is something that we know the Romans did. Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries also used flower pots to transport crops between continents for agricultural purposes, not realising (or not caring about) the damage they were doing in the process to local ecosystems. 

Today, you’ll find many different kinds of pot, made out of many different kinds of material –⁠ from stone, to ceramics, to plastic, to cardboard and paper. Some have a rim. Some come in fancy colours. Some have holes in the bottom. Some are decorated. 

But Minecraft? Minecraft just has one type of flower pot. Because we believe it’s what you put in it that counts.