Glass Flowers

The Glass Flowers, formally The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, is a world famous collection of highly realistic glass botanical models at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.

They were made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka from 1887 through 1936 at their studio in Hosterwitz, Germany, near Dresden. The collection was commissioned by Professor George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of Harvard's Botanical Museum, to aid in teaching botany and was financed by Mary Lee Ware and her mother, Elizabeth C. Ware. There are 847 life-size models representing 780 species and varieties of plants in 164 families as well as over 3,000 models of details such as enlargements of plant parts and anatomical sections. The collection comprises approximately 4,400 individual glass models.

In 1886 the Blaschkas were approached by Professor Goodale, who had come to Dresden for the sole purpose of finding them, with a request to make a series of glass botanical models for Harvard. Leopold was initially unwilling as his current business of selling Glass sea creatures was hugely successful but, eventually, the famed glass artists agreed to send test-models to the U.S. and, although damaged in customs, the fragments convinced Goodale that Blaschka glass art was a more than worthy educational investment. His reasons for wanting the models was simple: At that time, Harvard was the global center of botanical study. As such, Goodale wanted the best, but the only used method was showcasing pressed and carefully labeled specimens — a methodology that offered a twofold problem: being pressed, the specimens were two-dimensional and tended to lose their color. Hence they were hardly the ideal teaching tools. However, Harvard had recently procured several of the Blaschkas' marine invertebrates and, upon seeing them, Professor Goodale realized that glass flowers would solve his problem as, being glass, they were both three-dimensional and would retain their color.

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