….no matter what anyone says. That is the real fascination, after the first moment of wondering what the hell you are looking at; it’s the fact that they are made of glass and paint. It’s looking at them and wondering how glass can be melted and drawn into leaves, petals, fine root hairs, and somehow pieced together into near perfect simulations of plant specimens.
It doesn’t seem possible and they have never been replicated.
They were made by a father and son, the Blashkas, Czech glass artists, who produced 4,300 glass models exclusively for Harvard, representing 780 plant species, over a span of 50 years.
A few of my favorites, native plants of the northeastern United States:
Like Monarda, “absolutely irresistible to butterflies, bees and hummingbirds!” according to Bluestone Perennials, a nursery in Ohio.
“The flowers are tubular and bilaterally symmetric, with a narrow upper lip and a wider lower lip. The wildflowers are single, but some cultivated forms have double flowers. They are monoecious, with male and female structures in each flower. There are two stamens. Inflorescences occur at the top of the stem or emerge from the axils. They are typically crowded, head-like clusters of flowers with leafy bracts. Flower color varies, with wild species bearing red, pink, and light purple flowers.” (Wikipedia)
I put in this partial description because of the precision of its language and because it hints at the depth of observation in the science of botany.
The glass flowers were acquired as an identification tool for student botanists. Surprisingly, they aren’t considered valuable for botanists anymore: they are a curious relic of the last great age of plant exploration and taxonomy in the 1900s. That age was about visual observation and classifying plants into species and families. DNA has reclassified some plants, but it is amazing how accurate the early botanists were.
The idea of the models as a teaching tool is a concept that was controversial from the start. One of the most interesting reasons is that they are very faithful to the original specimens, blemishes and all, realistic instead of stressing the distinctive plant morphology (the study of the physical form and external structure of plants).
Another is that botanists emphasized the importance of seeking plants in the wild where everything else about the plant, its habitat, and the surrounding plants would be valuable to know: it’s not just about learning the names.
Photographs also became a source of botanical identification, which made the models less important. And now AI will tell you, not always accurately, but still amazing in its own way.
Warning! Do not use it for identifying edible plants.
This lovely plant common to weedy areas and meadows blooms in the late summer and fall which provides food for the bees and butterflies when most other plants have stopped blooming. It is a member of the Family Asteraceae, which is a large family of flowering plants that consists of over 32,000 known species. Daisies and sunflowers and chamomiles are part of this family as you might be able to tell from the characteristic composite flowerhead.
In my early years as a gardener, I pulled these as weeds because they seed prolifically and can “take over.” I would never do that now because they are used by so many native pollinators which are in trouble because of destroyed habitat.
As a painter, I’m interested in how people see and recognize things. If you take a good look at the two pictures of asters, I promise that you will see them all over the place in NYC, in the parks and the tree beds for the rest of August and September, and there will probably be a bee or two on them. It is a fact that what we don’t see, we just don’t see until we do.
The visual identification of plants is rarely taught on a university level now, but it is alive and well among the gardeners.The names of plants is not an easy knowledge to acquire. Flowers, the most obvious way to begin to recognize plants, are ephemeral. Monarda, for example, blooms in my garden from late spring to early summer and the whole plant dies back from the first frost until the next spring. It also has many common names: crimson beebalm, scarlet beebalm, scarlet monarda, Eau-de-Cologne plant, Oswego tea, and bergamot.
I had the luck to work for two passionate gardeners who continuously named the plants by their Latin and common names and described their habits. My sister-in-law is also a keen-eyed genius at finding rare plants in the woods. Every year we hike to see the trillium and other spring plants in the mountains of North Carolina. In the fall we look for the meadow flowers: goldenrods and asters and the butterflies that drink from them.
I recently asked two gardeners connected with Green Thumb where they learned to identify plants, and both said from their grandmothers. It is an example of a kind of knowledge that can best be learned orally.
A similar plant is False Solomon’s Seal. Solomon’s Seal carries its flowers beneath the leaves and False Solomon’s Seal carries them on top. The story I heard is that False Solomon’s Seal is showy and Solomon’s Seal is modest. I took a class at The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and the teacher reprimanded me for bringing up an anthropomorphic reason for identification but if you learn it that way you never forget it.
I saw this definition by Laura Morelli: “There is art in craft and craft in art. But craft aims for perfection, and art aims for full expression.” *
The glass flowers are not art, but they make you think about what art is.
Is this “full expression”? I don’t know what that means, but this drawing is so beautiful; da Vinci’s plants seem to grow; he has rendered them perfectly and has also seen into and captured their spiraling life force.
In Deleuze’s On Painting, he describes external verisimilitude as the first form of molding or modulating. I suppose we might compare it now to AI reproduction.
How can we tell the Glass Flowers aren’t real? It’s a silly question but “what is real?” is becoming an important one.
They don’t change and every living plant begins to wilt when it is picked or cut; they are perfect and yet they don’t have that spiraling life force; the longer you look at them, the more brittle they become.
In 1999, the term “plant blindness” was coined. It is about the inability to recognize plants, about walking through nature and seeing it as an undifferentiated green space.
Visual observation is important. In recent years, someone noticed that the plants that gardeners prized so highly—ornamental species from all over the world, and the ubiquitous grass lawns—were creating “dead” gardens for wildlife: the bees, wasps, butterflies, moths and birds.
That’s the biggest thing in gardening right now, making a space for the beneficial (not to say crucial) insects even right here in NYC. It’s worth noticing.
I’m going to end by disagreeing with Emily Dickinson’s poem, “To Make a Prairie”. She was right in 1755 maybe, but not now.
“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
—CNQ