Butterflies and Glass Flowers

The air was warmer this morning when I left for Cambridge. The snow was slowly melting and the sun brightly shining. I wandered on the campus of Harvard until it led me to the Museum of Natural History, a place I had never been before. Though I would much rather spend a Saturday afternoon looking at art rather than fossils, I knew this museum would possess at least a few gems that would capture my eye, and I found some of them quickly, like the butterflies and beetles that were more colorful than any person in the building.

But it was the glass flowers that piqued my interest. In the late 1800s, a father and son from Germany created a collection of more than 4,000 glass flowers based on 800 different plant species. Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka started by making glass models of invertebrate animals, which captivated the attention of a Mr. George Lincoln Goodale, who happened to be in the process of founding Harvard's Botanical Museum. Dissatisfied with the lifeless wax models used at the time,  he called upon the Blaschkas for help who in turn created the incredible collection I saw today.  And it truly IS incredible. The level of detail and accuracy is uncanny and a joy to see. These men were true artists and skilled craftsman. The glass models look as real as any wildflower picked in a meadow or any daffodil grown in your garden. It was hard to leave them.