ABLOOM! The Glass Flowers at Harvard

by Dea Adria Mallin

Know that it starts with grasses and ends with daisies and that it includes such seemingly disparate elements as cashews, beets, agave leaves, coconuts, casuarinas, orchids, clematis, and water lilies; that there are over one thousand florets on the goldenrod plant alone; that there are 4,400 models, 75% of which are life-sized; that two men -- a father and his son -- executed every piece of this astounding collection of glass flowers ; that their first shipment from Europe was unloaded carelessly on the Boston docks and arrived broken, so it stands to reason that you shouldn’t bump or lean on the glass cases now. Standing in awe here before the beauty and vitality of the plant kingdom, rendered in glass, I overhear the lawyer next to me say to his son, “Look, I’m not a nerd, son, but I just can’t tear myself away!”

The attorney and I are not alone in this sentiment. Glassblowers from all over the world, one after another, have exclaimed, “This is impossible!” when they see, for the first time and time and again, the acclaimed Glass Flowers exhibition by Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf Blaschka at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The story begins in 1886 when Harvard professor George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard, went to Dresden, Germany to convince the superlatively skilled Blaschkas, who had been making marine invertebrates for museums worldwide, to undertake the production of glass models of plants for the museum. Struck with their fragile beauty, artistry, and workmanship when the first unbroken plants arrived, Bostonian Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware decided to finance the project, a project of breadth and longevity that was, like the flowers themselves, almost beyond imagining.  

Early on, some of the plants were actually sent from America to Germany so that the Blaschkas could cultivate them in their own garden. Exotic tropical plants were already growing in the royal greenhouses nearby, but before long, the younger Blaschka was traveling to the Caribbean to draw and take notes and preserve specimens. The elder Blaschka died in 1895, but his son, traveling hither and yon to draw and collect specimens, worked on the monumental flower project until his own death in 1936.

Over the half-century that the work proceeded, Rudolf Blaschka did make some technological revisions, ensuring that the color and surfaces of the work would stabilize and endure, but no secret processes ever went into the manufacture of the models. The Blaschkas’ worktables were, by Goodale’s description, “covered with rods and tubes of glass, and blocks of colored glass, and spools of wire of different sorts. The bellows under the table are of the ordinary sort used by glassworkers, and the blast-tube is a very simple one of glass.”

The Blaschkas experimented with various techniques to perfect colors and to work with internal wire supports, glue, and enamels to render veracity. Some of their floral models were blown, some used colored glass, and others were painted with a thin wash of colored ground or metal oxides and heated until the material fused to the model. The models have been described as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.” 

The Blaschkas had a remarkable understanding of botany at a time when only wax and papier-mache models were available to botany students and to the public, with neither accuracy nor longevity. The unique chemical and physical properties of glass allowed the Blaschkas to transmit the translucent quality of the flowers, the sturdy elements of the leaves, and the brittle strength of, say, the cactus spine.

The 847 life-sized models in the Ware Collection, representing 780 species and varieties of plants in 164 families, together with over 3,000 detailed models of enlarged flowers and anatomical sections of floral and vegetative parts of the plants, plus the models showing the complex histories of fungi and ferns, and the 64 models showing fungal diseases of fruits, and the models of plants and insects showing pollination could not be a better teaching tool for young botanists. Besides being accurate to the tiniest detail of say, the longitudinal or transverse section of an ovary, these glass flowers, unlike greenhouse flowers, are in bloom everlastingly, and nothing will make you sneeze.  

Then, there are the intricacies of packing the glass flowers --  so important that the exhibit includes samples of the preparation for shipping. Indeed, for sixty-three years, the unpacking of each shipment by sea from Germany to the Botanical Museum remained in the hands of one man, Louis Bierweiler.

A few of the glass models were lent out as early as 1893 for major expositions, wrapped ever so carefully, and in 1974, using Styrofoam instead of straw webbing, three models traveled to Tokyo with a first-class airplane seat and a seat belt and extra webbing. When the Steuben Glass Company arranged for a special month-long exhibition in their Fifth Avenue showrooms in New York City in 1976, tests showed that the least threatening mode of transport was the hearse, and so the glass flowers, which had traveled by hearse on icy roads to a small plane between Logan Airport and LaGuardia and then by hearse to Fifth Avenue, traveled the entire 200 miles back to Cambridge by hearse, arriving safely. 

In the museum exhibit itself, walk the rows of cases and observe the delicacy of the petals of the purple aster, or the wisps of roots, or the snow-white Indian-pipe, or the Coffea Arabica, a source of coffee whose clusters of white, star-like flowers are rendered so exquisitely that one swears there is an aroma.

There are the blue-green leathery leaves of the poppy, and the slender, spiky leaves of the Mimosa pudica. There are the waxy crimson flowers of the cockscomb with its backward-bent spines on the petioles, and there are the rolled-up pinkish leaves of the Scarlet-flowered Brownea. There are the strawberries that make small children reach out towards them, licking their lips, and there are the vegetable wonders, the pouch-like pitcher plants with hairy, fringed wings. There are the showy orchids, in all their guises and delicate colors and textures, and the iris, its long, long stem arising from stout rhizomes and its delicate blue flower with inner floral segments, almost spoon-shaped. And then, beyond the possible, are such glass flowers as the Tasmanian Blue Gum, its multitude of stamens like the slenderest threads, and the water hyacinth with its lavender flowers holding a deep blue center and yellow markings. The water hyacinth’s showy flowers, in life last only a few hours, but at the museum, their beauty is eternal.   

Visitors to Glass Flowers number over 150,000 a year, and Bostonians like to say that even in the icy cold of winter, a garden of flowers is blooming in Cambridge. A curious balance this is, between summer and winter, and a curious balance too, exists in that the flowers were made by a father and his son, the last in a line of family jewelers and glassmakers going back to 15^th century Venice, and they were preserved by a mother and her daughter.

Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA. (617)495-3045. www.hmnh.harvard.edu. Fully illustrated catalogue “The Glass Flowers at Harvard” by Schultes, Davis, and Burger. 

Also see Drawing Upon Nature: Studies for the Blaschkas' Glass models, http://www.cmog.org/index.asp?pageId=1558.