Raise your hand if you know the identity of the flower in the above picture.

If you didn’t sleep through your college botany class like I did, you may have said banana – and you would be right (Musa paradisiaca, subspecies sapientum, to be precise).

Now raise your hand if you know what the flower in the picture is made of.

No, not plant, but *glass*.

When I first stepped into the glass flowers exhibit room at “Harvard’s Museum of Natural History”:https://www.hmnh.harvard.edu/on_exhibit/the_glass_flowers_collection.html, I thought I had walked into the wrong exhibit. This looked like some sort of ecology room with little flowers pinned everywhere. I was there for the glass… Oh wait. And just like that, I was in awe.

The mind-blowing level of detail in the collection of glass flowers is truly disorienting. Created by the father and son team of “Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaschka in the 19th century, the ~3000 piece collection was commissioned by the founder of Harvard’s Botanical Museum for teaching purposes. At the time (and to this day) the models were an invaluable tool in showing students what exotic plants looked like, inside and out, in the absence of adequate photography and sample preservation techniques. The Blaschka’s adapted traditional jewelry-making techniques to manufacture the glass flowers based on real specimens, the origin and year of collection of which is marked next to each display.

!https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfTYRHK1LI/AAAAAAAADpQ/p8p0wc-liOs/s320/mounted.jpg!

Their mastery of glass working techniques, not to mention their attention to detail, was such that they fashioned individual glass hairs to stick out from roots and weeds, and imbued leaves with texture ranging from turgid and vibrant to crinkly and weak.

!https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfThwI9j2I/AAAAAAAADpo/TVLlX2nfeys/s320/thin+hairs.jpg!

Occasionally, the glass was painted to perfectly match the original plant. Other times, the artists would blend glass to their own stringent color specifications.

!https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfTVDblgXI/AAAAAAAADpI/BK7MdQYmS6o/s320/glass.jpg!

_Glass blocks on the table thought to have been used in the making of the glass flowers._

Alongside each perfect glass copy of a plant, lie glass cross-sections and magnifications of the plant’s various parts, allowing for a lesson in comparative plant anatomy and yet another reason to exhale – a little too loudly – “cool!”

!https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfTbjYHGcI/AAAAAAAADpY/aK58kBd8A0M/s320/ovary.jpg!

Prior to receiving the commission from the Botanical Museum, the Blaschkas honed their skills making glass eyes and models of marine invertebrates.

!https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfTRiIQwEI/AAAAAAAADpA/nsIPE1EqLAY/s320/eyes.jpg!

_Up close, the eyes were so real as to be uncomfortable to look at. My favorite one (because I had to pick a favorite fake eye) is the slightly bloodshot one in the center_.

!https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_RMeuKflAWTw/SYfTfFC6dsI/AAAAAAAADpg/tWMwsKDbKM8/s320/sea+creature.jpg!

The glass work exhibit was only a small part of the Natural History Museum, but one I spent the most time in. It was unlike anything else I had ever seen before. All these years later, the Blaschkas’ observations and representations of nature are striking. That, and they are just really cool.