April 1, 2009: Fragile Flora

[xoxoxoBruce]

Bifurcated Rivets linked a Curious Expeditions page, on the Fragile Flora display at Harvard's Museum of Natural History. Yes, the Harvard.

I know it's no Aprils fool's joke because I've been there, seen these.

The Fragile Flora Collection is a display of pretty flowers, various plants, and seed pods.



It's very large collection, quite extensive and impressive



The collection is is from the late 19th century and all GLASS.

Leopold Blaschka and his son Rudolf came from a long line of talented glassmakers. As a hobby, Leopold began making glass flowers from illustrations in natural history books. So beautiful, accurate and delicate were these models, a buzz began to generate in his hometown in Germany, and a local aristocrat commissioned 100 glass orchids. Leopold’s son, Rudolf joined him in the painstakingly intricate work. Thus began a prolific career in natural history glassmaking, ending in the largest commission of their lives; an order from Harvard college for over 3000 plant and flower models for their botany students. Leopold didn’t live to see the completion of the project, but Rudolf continued on without him, working alone from 1895 - 1936, three years before his own death.

This is long before they could Google the information, and even the photography of the era was limited, so I guess they would have to work with real plants, and flowers that would wither and die as they worked. But somehow they achieved amazing accuracy.

The astonishing accuracy of Harvard’s glass flowers has surprised many of the museum’s visitors, who, on seeing the display, ask to see the glass flowers. They don’t believe what they are seeing. And even I, knowing full well that what I was looking at was glass, couldn’t find anything recognizably glass-like about them at all. The only hints were some nearly imperceptible tiny cracks in a few of the stems.