Glass act

As usual after the end of Chelsea Flower Show, I felt as flat as champagne left out in the sun. I was glad that I had a holiday in Boston (Mass. rather than Lincs.) in prospect. And, as luck would have it, the trip provided me with an unexpected botanical box of delights, exactly where I was not looking for it. That place was the Museum of Natural History at Harvard, where the Ware Collection of Glass Flowers is housed. I don’t know why I had never heard of this — plainly very famous — collection before. But I have now.

In the 1880s, the director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard, Professor George Lincoln Goodale, was worried about the quality of botanical specimens for his students to study, since only dried plants, or low-grade representations in papier-mâché or wax, existed. He heard of two Bohemian workers in glass, Leopold Blaschka and his son, Rudolph, who were known for making minutely accurate glass models of marine invertebrates for museums. The Blaschkas came from a long line of jewellers and glass-makers, which began in Venice in the 15th century. Leopold maintained: ‘The only way to become a glass modeler of skill, is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass…’ Goodale visited the Blaschkas in 1886, at their workshop at Hosterwitz, near Dresden. Initially, they agreed to make just a few plants out of glass but, by 1936, when Rudolph finally retired, they had achieved 4,300, depicting 847 different species, both tropical and temperate, and including parts of flowers, magnified many times. Some models were blown, others shaped after the glass was heated, by the process called lamp-working. The colours came either from the glass itself or were painted on to the glass, which was then heated until they fused with the model.