The Glass Flowers

Recently, I was fortunate enough to find myself in the city of Boston and while there, I was told to visit the Harvard Natural History Museum to see their collection of botanical samples. Now, I’ll be the first to say that I’m neither the most knowledgeable nor the most interested in flowers, but I decided to go. I’m glad I did. One room within this museum is devoted to botanical samples produced in astonishing detail- and made entirely out of glass. Here in front of me were cases and cases filled with beautiful reproductions of flowers, fruits and leaves created by people who were

undoubtedly masters of their craft. Every detail is represented so beautifully that you question constantly whether this is all that the information plaques dotted around the room tell you. Every vein in each leaf, every petal, every tiny stem is made from glass to perfectly represent flowers from all over the world.

The collection was made as an aid for teaching Botany at Harvard University on the insistence of Professor George Lincoln Goodale. The samples the university had at the time were crude representations made in paper maiche or wax and climatic and geographic factors prevented natural samples being studied. Therefore, Leopold Blaschka, who came from a long line of Jewellery and glass makers, was commissioned to make glass representations of flower samples for Harvard in 1887, and up to 1936, Leopold, together with his son, Rudolph, made life size models including 847 plant and fungal species, as well as anatomical sections and enlarged flower parts in their workshop based in Hosterwitz, near Dresden in Germany.

Now, as small as my knowledge is concerning plants, it is even less when it comes to the production of glass, but I was enthralled by the beauty of each specimen and the obvious mastery of the craft and I began to wonder why I felt this way. A pretty flower is alw-

ays a nice thing to see, but personally I wouldn’t linger too long to admire most when I see them growing around me. Likewise, if someone pointed out a Beautiful piece of glassware in a bizarre form, I would look and marvel at it, but I wouldn’t be able to understand the process and the skill involved. So why was it that a combination of these had me so enamoured?

After thinking about it for a while it dawned on me how everything is reproduced so faithfully and just how they achieved this, how is everything so life-like. Then I realised that by marrying the mastery of craft with a form that everyone can relate too, the craft is suddenly accessible. You can understand how talented these people were by not understanding how on earth they did it. A bit of a paradox really, a form you understand in a medium you don’t, but that mystery is exactly what kept me gazing at each piece. I didn’t understand how it was done, but I didn’t need too, I could see the skill, the time, the heartache that went into each piece and I could relate to it without having ever worked glass.

Something I always like to hear when someone sees a detail in my work is “How did you do that?”. Maybe that’s vain, but it makes me feel as though I have something to offer in

the pieces I produce. Looking at these flowers, I was the one asking how these pieces were produced and finding that I took joy in not knowing. That element of mystery kept me interested. I will, more likely than not, never produce hundreds of species of flowers in glass (or any other material for that matter), but if I can get even the smallest fraction of that mystery into my work, to keep people wondering how it was done, I’d consider it a success.