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.
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