# Botanical Alchemy: The Blaschka Glass Flowers and the Vegetal Humanities February 18, 2026 By Pauline Shongov | Edited by Rachael Petersen Between 1886 and 1936, Leopold and his son Rudolph Blaschka completed over 4,300 glass models, representing over 750 species of plants (along with some fungi and algae), for the Harvard Botanical Museum. Over those fifty years, the Blaschkas worked diligently from their studio in Dresden under the patronage of Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware and at the request of Professor George Lincoln Goodale. They studied plants grown from seeds that the Harvard Botanic Garden would send to them with Rudolf, on occasion, attending botanical trips overseas to collect additional pressed plants and pickled specimen. At first called the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, the works intended to provide students of botany access to vegetal specimen through glass models so life-like and refined that their highly natural appearance took the permanent place of real vegetal life against the workings of time. ![Aristolochia](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-03/Aristolochia%202.jpg?itok=bX7xEWBA) *Aristolochia littoralis* \[syn *A. elegans*\], 20th century. Model 378. The Archives of Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka and the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, 1886-2020. ecb00006. Botany Libraries, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Botany Libraries, Harvard University.Over the years, as the discipline of botany evolved so did the place of the collection shift in the public imaginary. For some, the works indulged too much in vegetal surfaces alone to merit their role as scientific models. At the same time, the indelible craft and the enigma of the process to which these surfaces owed their lasting appearance gained the glass works their perennial standing as a global phenomenon. Recast as a strange amalgamation of aspiring scientific models that had since been retired to the status of unclassifiable objects, they would eventually be renamed as the Glass Flowers. Featured in countless photographs, poems, articles, and a novel, the Glass Flowers have since become a source of cultural production concerned not so much with the visibility of botanical study as with the enchanting ways in which they represent and reproduce vegetal life. Their enchantment lies in the ways in which their form — intricate botanical models with fine, profuse designs — seems to defy matter. In short, when first glimpsing the flowers, they appear impossible. This impossibility rests in the seeming limitations of their medium: glass, characterized by its hardness, transparency, and sheen, transfigures into a substance that is plastic, opaque, and weighted. Alchemy, commonly known as a medieval science and speculative philosophy, is born here instead from the surface tension—the chemical stresses immanent to the flowers themselves—that renders these objects impossible. It is this surface tension, I argue, that fashions the alchemical self-portrait: a material witness of sessile life, a documentary impulse that at once collapses forms of mediation with acts of vegetal becoming. Across techniques of botanical capture, the Glass Flowers are continually mediated by and through the figure of glass: from the glass of the microscope that assists in the close observation of plant specimen, to modeling specimens into glass plants, to the optical mechanics of a camera used to take a portrait of the models, to glass plates as the substrate on which those portraits are also made. To this end, the glassiness of the Glass Flowers is at once strange, deceptive, sensual, and haptic. They beguile us as, what Lorraine Daston calls, “things that talk.”[\[1\]](#_ftn1) They coax one to peer up close; to be enraptured by their delicate details, their descriptive forms; to even be compelled to extend a hand, despite the exhibition signs that forbid one to touch. In these occult relationships to the real, botanical alchemy takes preliminary shape in the space of an artisan studio turned amateur chemistry lab. Just as medieval alchemists would try their hand at transmuting lead into gold, the Blaschkas would, in effect, manipulate glass into vegetal matter. In an open flame, molten glass would be pulled, stretched, crinkled, and pinched into the curvature of a paper-thin petal, the hairy folds of a root system, the bristling spines of a cactus, the gelatin spores of moss, the soft fuzz of fruit mold. Adopting layman’s methods from chemistry books, the Blaschkas eventually modified commercial glass into a personal palette of glass types and colors. Metal became an elemental force by which these delicate and intricate forms of vegetal, algal, fungal life emerged: from lead used as solder to chromium, iron, cobalt, and gold added to the melt for color. Yet, far from following a set of controlled procedures, the Blaschkas departed from other glassmaking traditions of the time by experimenting boldly and widely within their medium. From treating the outer surface of glass alone to modifying its chemistry on the scale of the atom, the Blaschkas eventually reinvented glassy matter in ways that both unsettled the reproducibility of their objects and imbued them with a vegetal vibrancy. ![Begonia](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-03/Begonia%202.jpg?itok=r6MOvVMI) *Begonia gracilis*, 20th century. Model 267. The Archives of Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka and the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, 1886-2020. ecb00006. Botany Libraries, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Botany Libraries, Harvard University.The level of detail in the texture of a vine, the bulge of a stamen, draws close attention not only to how forms were sculpted but also, more notably, to their painterly surface. In what Susan Rossi-Wilcox—curator of the Glass Flowers through the early 2000s—termed a “painter’s palette,” the Blaschkas made their own color cullets.[\[2\]](#_ftn2) They crushed them into powdered pigments to coat their models, adding heat to fuse the glass layers together and then etch details upon the aggregate surface. It is, precisely, this messy relationship between artistry and chemistry that makes the illusion of vegetal life possible: To paint with glass is, in fact, to disobey the glassy medium that one apprentices. In his work on painting and alchemy, art historian James Elkins reminds that painting is intimately bound to the alchemical processes that makes the substance of paint a medium in the first place.[\[3\]](#_ftn3) To push and pull at paint is to transform its material composition and, by doing so, to mediate the experience of form. To treat glassy matter as paint is to give it color, density, luminosity, while forging a set of highly unstable, unruly objects. As a result of this method, the models began to exhibit symptoms of so-called “glass disease”: their crizzling forms, decades later, interchangeable with the figure of rot in the decomposing fruit series. This slow demise is what conservator Carlo Pantano would later attribute more generally to “surface tension”: a chemical mismatch in material properties that rips through to the objects’ visible surface.[\[4\]](#_ftn4) What had been a project in preserving vegetal life, indefinitely—where glass alone was to achieve a level of detail and permanence that less durable mediums like wax, paper mâché, and dried specimen of that time could not—became, in equal measure, a project on preserving the aura of the aesthetic object. As one critic put it, the newfound focus on preservation made the Glass Flowers more alive than the plant life they represented. Even subsonic vibrations from outdoor construction in the yard or footsteps on a staircase adjacent to the collection made the Glass Flowers nearly quiver, if not break. If their deceptively real appearance at first generated the aura of myth around their production, the fact that they could no longer be reproduced as glass objects only further solidified their authenticity. Within this creative practice of imitation and transmutation, contingency and indeterminacy become active agents in the formation of the alchemical self-portrait. Surface tension, I argue, moves beyond the material properties of glass alone to constitute, moreover, that which is at play between the object and its representation. Emerging from the fortuitous experimentation that shapes the Glass Flowers into alchemical self-portraits of botanical specimen, surface tension provokes a most compelling question: If the Glass Flowers are no longer capable objects for teaching botany, what can the close observation of the surface of things, at the moment in which they begin to break down, possibly teach instead? It is at the surface, after all, where practices of observation from the field and the lab collide. It is also at the surface, which enraptures with its vibrant realism and deceives with its allusive appearance—the irreproducible object reproduced as an ineffable image—where the story of the Glass Flowers, and the modest gesture they have to offer the vegetal humanities rests. Figuring across a range of media—cyanotypes, lantern slides, film photographs, color slides, stereoscopes, and glass plate negatives—the Glass Flowers can be brilliantly amorphous: awash in the soft glow of the Prussian blue of iron salts to the metallic sheen of silver nitrate and silver chloride particles to the magenta haze of color slides. They are incredibly photogenic. The immanence of the reproducible image, and its deep entanglement with alchemy and vegetal matter, takes precedence in these 19th century inventions. After all, at the heart of photographic print processes, as with the Blaschkas’ glassmaking, lies the alchemical principal on the transmutation of matter and its insistence upon the ineffable: as one substance becomes another, so does its affect on the beholder take on new shape. As the emulsified surface encounters a chemical change when exposed to the sun—making a latent image emerge that fully develops by soaking in a series of chemical baths—so does the image accrue newfound aura. In a nod to alchemy as not only a predecessor, but also a quiet accomplice to photography, cabalistic language conjures up this time-based process within the fixed image. Magic, atmosphere, phenomena amongst other words saturate the post-Enlightenment return to Romantic discourse around 19th century practices in image-making. Describing the vitality of the indexical image, these locutions eventually move into more contemporary calls for the agential possibilities of vegetal sentience through various acts of mediation. ![Nymphaea](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-03/Nymphaea%202.jpg?itok=_sJhYbfF) N*ymphaea odorata*. Model 731. The Archives of Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka and the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, 1886-2020. ecb00006. Botany Libraries, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Botany Libraries, Harvard University.Practices of observation and reproduction mark the emergence of the alchemical self-portrait of sessile life: the impressions of vegetal, algal, fungal, polyp matter made by metal, light, or irradiation. While these date as far back as the Middle Ages through *naturselbstdruck* (nature’s self-printing), the “magic realized” first appears in scientist Henry Fox Talbot’s “photogenic drawings”: cameraless images, or drawings with light, where the “picture makes itself” through direct contact between plants, amongst other objects, and salt-coated paper.[\[5\]](#_ftn5) Botanist Anna Atkins later improves upon Talbot’s process through the cyanotype.[\[6\]](#_ftn6) Registering fields of energy in much more acute ways than the salt print, the cyanotype captures the action of light around the wispy and rubbery contours of the British algae that Atkins later becomes most well known for. Much like the sessility of these organisms characterized by their lively rootedness to place, the alchemical self-portrait materializes out of the slow change of a base medium used to fix the vibrancy of living matter in real time. Eventually, the alchemical self-portrait no longer only borrows its form through the touch of light and its optical capture of cast shadows into shadowy luminescence. It now also accounts for the isotopic decay emanating from irradiated matter, apprehending unstable life forms through currents of radiant energy. In what scholar Yuriko Furuhata calls “autoradiographs,” ecologists of the Cold War would make x-rays in the field, impressing irradiated coral reefs upon emulsified glass plates to visualize the impact of nuclear weapons testing on marine life in Bikini Atoll.[\[7\]](#_ftn7) To this end, the alchemical self-portrait—lifted and extracted from the biotic body—expands on a Kittlerian theory of media inscription. By foregrounding the storage and transmission of energy across surfaces through vibrant matter, the alchemical self-portrait re-imagines sessile life as elemental media. If there is anything that the Glass Flowers—so delicate, so materially unstable—can teach, it is that the alchemical self-portrait manifests in its active resistance to interpretation while simultaneously surrendering to the interpretative play that is immanent to the medium itself. The abstraction of form enchants by the inscriptive contingencies and irresistible touch that the respective medium brings to the ineluctable translation of sessile matter into its self-portrait. Held in tension with its brush against vegetal thinking, the alchemical self-portrait of sessile life thus offers a privileged intimacy to vegetal, algal, fungal, polyp matter and unique access to the occult knowledge of the mediums used for their capture. ![Pauline Shongov](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-03/pauline.jpg?itok=LZfdx4uU) **Pauline Shongov** is an artist, filmmaker, and visual/media studies scholar. Her work explores oral, historical, affective, and haptic senses of place and cuts across the fields of media archaeology, ruination studies, process philosophy, elemental media, visual ethnography, ecological thought, and history of science. Her scholarship has been published in Metode (ROM for Art and Architecture) and Thresholds (MIT Press). She is the co-founder of the practice-based research initiative [Off-site](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.off-2Dsite.space_&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=nc-4zgzB-GNFwA2VlRB0g4n_FpIR84SBX9cq5FjKY0E&m=ILPDkWQPYrpIUGNkBXpVp1kyQws8vbmvtxM6WPrBCNGRtRyzVJtV_CnhW17vW5I-&s=fLY_uyjZozizVnfwzFAUbFPgNnwwKxOfrnDzRDQASH4&e=) and [Afield Practice](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.instagram.com_afield.practice_&d=DwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=nc-4zgzB-GNFwA2VlRB0g4n_FpIR84SBX9cq5FjKY0E&m=ILPDkWQPYrpIUGNkBXpVp1kyQws8vbmvtxM6WPrBCNGRtRyzVJtV_CnhW17vW5I-&s=9w_v9P-PfbCX65_e3FwhBHZaUyBO8M21uCndV9-WNRU&e=). Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. --- [\[1\]](#_ftnref1) From *Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science*, by Lorraine Daston, 2004, Zone Books, distributed by MIT Press Books. [\[2\]](#_ftnref2) From “Flowers out of Glass,” by Nancy Marie Brown, 2015, *Penn State University Research*, [Online](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/flowers-out-glass). [\[3\]](#_ftnref3) See *What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy*, by James Elkins, 1999, Routledge. [\[4\]](#_ftnref4) From “Flowers out of Glass,” by Nancy Marie Brown, 2015, *Penn State University Research*, [Online](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/flowers-out-glass). [\[5\]](#_ftnref5) From “Talbot’s Natural Magic,” by Douglas R Nickel, 2002, *History of Photography*, Vol. 26 (No. 2), p.133; From “On the Singularity of Early Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot’s Botanical Images,” by Vered Maimon, 2011, *Art History*, Vol. 34 (No. 5), p. 960. [\[6\]](#_ftnref6) See “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,” by Anna Atkins, Natural History Museum, London, Library and Archives, [Online](https://nhm.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/view/BookReaderViewer/44NHM_INST/12190875980002081). [\[7\]](#_ftnref7) See “Autoradiography: Self-Portraits of Coral,” by Yuriko Furuhata, 2024, *Journal of Environmental Media*, Vol. 5 (No. 1), p. 109–15. See also:- [ TWPF Blog Page ](/programming-threads/twpf-blog-page)