Glass flowers

Magnet #978 - Harvard Museum of Natural History

Eeeep, I missed a magnet yesterday! It's because I totally spaced on going to Boston with my parents...luckily, they called me from the road in Delaware, so I had time to run some errands.

All of which meant no sleep, and a quick pitstop at Mohegan Sun (to lose a load of dollars, quarters, nickels and pennies) to spend about an hour in Hingham, MA, for my dad's eye appointment and to come all the way back down 95 home. And straight to bed, where I didn't get up til this morning. Heh.

Anyway. We went to Harvard Museum of Natural History on one of our Boston roadtrips earlier this year. My aunt brought us, so that we could visit their Glass Flowers permanent exhibit.

It's a collection of about 4,000 glass flowers, of all shapes, forms and countries. It's totally cool, because it's not just the blooms, but the leaves and even cross-sections of the stems and roots, etc. All from glass!

A Harvard botany prof wanted to have them made for his classes, so from about 1887 to 1936, they produced them out of Germany. Apparently, they didn't have anything but crude papier mache and illustrations, and he wanted something better.

And better he got, because when you walk through room, seeing case after case after case of these things, you just cannot believe they're all made from glass.

Definitely worth a trip for a different type of leaf-peeping!