It is easy to get lost in the tall grasses.They stretch out, the matte green of theirleaves conveying what it would be like totouch them, to run your finger down theblade and feel the rough resistance ofthese durable plants’ skin: the gama grass,rough hair grass and broom beard grass.Their spindly, delicate roots seem justplucked from the earth.

It would be possible to spend a morn-ing with these three alone. But there areat least 3,000 other plants in this cool,gently lit room with its muffling gray-brown rug. And they are just as entranc-ing. Arranged in shallow wooden cases,this botanical collection at the HarvardMuseum of Natural History is unique.No hothouse or herbarium contains any-thing comparable; no wilted, brownedspecimens pressed between paper rival it.These plants and flowers are made ofglass—down to the tiny, hairlike bristleson some of their roots. They look so real,so exactly like their soil-anchored coun-terparts the world over, that some peoplespend hours in the Ware Collection ofGlass Models of Plants: seeing flora as iffor the first time, trying to spot an incon-sistency between a model and a recollec-tion of the real thing, straining to see brit-tle glass where it seems there is only yield-ing tissue.

Beginning with grasses—includingfloating manna-grass, squirrel-tail grass,pigeon grass—on the left side of the small,three-aisled room, and ending with a casecontaining chicory on the right, the collec-tion holds about 800 species—palm, lily,orchid, cactus, cacao, laurel, sunflower,pitcher plant, goldenrod, zinnia and ivy

among them. Many of the displays in-clude not only a plant and its flowers butalso enlarged models of various parts:transected ovaries (magnified 50 to 60times in some instances) like thin, paleslices of cucumber, as well as stamens,stigmas and spikelets. A pollen grain 2,000times its natural size resembles a kooshball; another, a soccer ball. Sometimes thelight catches a petal and little sugarlikesparkles give away the glass. Such is thecase with the tiny purple flowers of thepineapple plant (Ananas comosus). In oth-er models, it is impossible to tell: the leavesof the ashy willow (Salix cinerea) are un-even in color, lighter green on the tipswith a dusting of brown—the imperfec-

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108 S C I E N T I F I C A M E R I C A N

Friable FlowersGLASS UNDER GLASS: HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S UNUSUAL BOTANICAL COLLECTION BY MARGUERITE HOLLOWAY

FRAGRANT WATER LILY (Nymphaea odorata)(above) and purple iris (Iris versicolor) (right) areamong the many flowers in the collection.

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tions so perfectly rendered that the branchseems just collected from the woods.

The pieces were created entirely bytwo artisans, Leopold and Rudolf Blasch-ka, between 1886 and 1936. The fatherand son lived near Dresden, Germany,and were renowned for their marine in-vertebrate models, three of which are dis-played elsewhere in Harvard’s naturalhistory museum: a jellyfish in the Trea-sures exhibit and a squid and a sea peach

in the Modeling Nature show. (A dozenor so of their other marine models are onview at the Corning Museum of Glass inCorning, N.Y., and will ultimately formpart of a much larger permanent collec-tion at Cornell University.) In the late1880s George L. Goodale, the first direc-tor of Harvard’s Botanical Museum,heard about plant models by the Blasch-kas and began commissioning glass flow-ers from them for educational use. Stu-dents could then study readily accessible,crystal-clear specimens.

Little is known about the Blaschkas’formal education, but their work suggestsa strong background in natural science.The duo experimented with various kindsand colors of glass, wire armatures, glue,metal and paint to create the models. Forinstance, according to a study in the Jour-nal of the American Institute for Conser-vation, the Blaschkas often added a gumarabic varnish to give the glossy glass amatte finish. “They are so absolutely ex-act that it is something of a mystery tous,” says curatorial associate and sciencehistorian Susan M. Rossi-Wilcox. “Theywere not stylizing at all, which is some-thing they could have done. They were re-ally obsessive.” Rossi-Wilcox, who is go-ing through the Blaschkas’ correspon-dence, says that the two would evendiscuss whether a specimen growing inthe unnaturally favorable conditions oftheir garden was appropriate to depict be-cause the resulting glass figure might notbe entirely accurate or real looking.

Modern teaching tools, including bet-ter microscopes and photographs, ren-dered the models more artistically than ed-ucationally relevant: “They evoke a time,just as fantastic botanical illustrations do,before the dissecting scope, before thosewere available to students,” notes author,anthropologist and botanist Wade Davis,who studied in the 1970s with Harvard’sfamous ethnobotanist Richard EvansSchultes. Although Davis says he did notvisit the collection to learn taxonomy, “itadded to the allure of the place that themain exhibit would be something as curi-ous and quaint and old-fashioned andtranscendent as those glass flowers.”

“The glass flowers were almost like ametaphysical presence, part of the mys-tique and the experience of that wholebuilding,” says another former Schultesstudent, Douglas C. Daly, curator of Ama-zonian botany at the New York Botani-cal Gardens. “Something that was pre-cious and protected and also somethingthey worried about a lot.”

That worrying continues today. Al-though the flowers were recently moved

away from the main staircase—where thevibrations from visitors’ feet were quiteintense—they have suffered damage overtime. You can see shattered glass under aleaf of a type of wild cucumber calledNimble Kate (Sicyos angulatus) and theunsightly glue of early restoration effortson many other models. Rossi-Wilcox saysthat there are thousands of cracks andbreaks: “All of the models need to becleaned, and a majority need to havesome small repairs.”

Because the Blaschkas trained no ap-prentices and kept poor records of theirtechniques, Rossi-Wilcox has initiatedhigh-tech analyses of the models to helpguide conservators. The museum is nowplanning a restoration that could take aminimum of 15,000 hours and cost asmuch as $5 million. Ideally, says museumdirector Joshua Basseches, the modelswould sit in vibration-free cases like thoseused in museums in earthquake zones.

Despite their beauty, the obvious vul-nerability of the flowers can make visitingthem a disturbing experience at times. Noone is stationed in the room to watch overthe exhibit, and in my several hours oflooking at the plants, I encountered sixschool groups, some of whose kids usedthe cases as a hard surface to write notesfor their assignments. But visitors of allages transgressed. Two men leaned againstthe displays, tapping on the glass casingto show each other some specimen thatwas most likely flaking glass as they didso. I left the room several times becauseit was too nerve-wracking to watch.

The Harvard Museum of NaturalHistory is located at 26 Oxford Street inCambridge, Mass., and is open everyday (except on four major holidays) from9 A.M. until 5 P.M. Admission is $6.50 foradults. For information, call 617-495-3045 or visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu.Additional resources: www.rps.psu.edu/sep99/glass.html; www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/11.16/12-flowers.html; and The Glass Flowers at Harvard, byRichard Evans Schultes and William A.Davis (1992).

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FLOWERS’ CREATORS also made enlarged plantparts for study, including these slices of ovary(upper and lower left), stamen (upper right) andpistil (lower right) of the Glory-Bush (Tibouchinasemidecandra).

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