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"View Slideshow\n\nThere are some treasures permanently stored in display cases in the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, and these treasures are flowers made of glass. They are called The Glass Flowers, with just that amount of plain certainty, as if they constituted a genus onto themselves, and in a way they do.\n\nTheir existence began in the late 19th century in the glass workshop of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a team of father-and-son artisans who lived and worked near Dresden, Germany. Until then, the Blaschkas had been involved in producing replicas of invertebrates who inhabit the sea, for museums. The study of the natural world was done through observing things that had been first dead and then preserved from decay. Imagine, then, the frustration of a scientist, or the curious-minded, who needed to look at their chosen world in its many stages of realization, but instead could only find it dried up and lacking any kind of vitality. It was the genius of a man named George Lincoln Goodale, a professor of botany at Harvard in the late 19th century, to travel to Germany and ask the Blaschkas to make replicas of some of the inhabitants of the vegetable kingdom. What he wanted was to show not just the various parts of plants\u2014flowers and their reproductive organs, leaves, stalks and so on\u2014but the diseases that might afflict them. And he wanted them not only for decoration, but as teaching tools. A student of botany could see as clearly as if it had just been picked from the American roadside, where it grows naturally, a branch of Aster novae-angliae. And perhaps most wonderful of all, the student need not worry about the specimen wilting and perishing, for it was made of glass, beautiful glass.\n\nAltogether, in the 19th century, the earth and the things that existed on its surface were of the utmost interest to certain people and some of the ways they pursued this interest are painful to recall. And that is partly why trying to understand the world of the vegetable kingdom portrayed so artfully in glass is a pleasure.\n\nTo see the flowers now made of glass, lying down on their sides, in their display cabinets, so accurate, so pristine, so without blemish, is to be in a state of wonderment. For in the end, they do not look like perfect flowers on the stems of perfect branches adorned with perfect leaves growing from perfect plants. They look real enough but as if the real is from another realm.\n\nI came to know of this place, this realm of the flowers made of glass, because one day a friend said to me that we should have coffee together and then go see the glass flowers. The glass flowers! I said out loud, and the glass flowers! I said to myself. The museum, where the glass flowers are on constant display, has had its small share of unpleasantness, the bones of Native Americans have been housed there, for instance, and so some people think twice before they rush off to view things kept in it. But the glass flowers are there to, in a small way, make amends.\n\nAmong the first of the glass renderings to greet a visitor are members of the Rosaceae family: apples, strawberries and peaches. There is a large branch of an apple tree thick with fully opened blossoms and young leaves. The branch is knobby and blackish, glistening as if covered with dew, looking so real with freshness and as if it is about to be offered to the person viewing it for some innocent and heroic deed. Not far from that and continuing in the same family is a rendering of the strawberry (Fragaria vesca). It is displayed on a branch with leaves and in three different stages of fruiting: the small, young fruit nestled in the sepals of the now passed flower, the ripening fruit and then the ripe strawberry waiting to be picked. There is another rendering of the strawberry, only fruits this time, and they are coated with a cottonlike substance, looking just the way strawberries look when you have not eaten them soon enough or have left them in the fridge too long.\n\nTo see the flowers of glass is to be in a state of wonderment.\n\nBut the vegetable Kingdom of Glass goes on. It goes into the Grasses and suddenly the thing you eat with enjoyment (that would be rice or a slice of bread) or the thing you walk on while having pleasant thoughts (that would be the lawn) are shown to be the same and yet different when encased in this glass. Or their reproductive mechanism can be seen in detail from many different angles: transverse or longitudinal, for instance. I only really understood the true beauty of stamen and pistil and pollen and petal after seeing them rendered in glass. This true beauty, of course, eventually led me into a state of dissatisfaction. The glass flowers and their many stages of being are in a state of perfection stilled. It is always a gardener&amp;#39;s wish to have perfection and then to have it forever. It is also within the gardener&amp;#39;s temperament to first desire forever and then to do everything possible to dismantle and smash forever. If the flowers encased in cabinets stored in the museum make up a garden, they are not the exception to this latter sentiment. Though it seems as if they will last forever, every cabinet bears a legend warning of their fragility. The people taking care of them give assurance that they will last forever. But as every gardener knows, forever is as long as a day.\n\n*The Harvard Museum of Natural History is located at\n\n Harvard University,\n\n 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.\n\n Telephone: 617/495-3045; fax: 617/496-8206;\n\n e-mail: HMNH@oeb.harvard.edu;\n\n Web site: www.hmnh.harvard.edu.*"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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