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Floral art in two cases
by Mariana Medrano
April, 2026
I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.
The Weather-Cock Points South, Amy Lowell. 1921.
Inside the Harvard Museum of Natural History, ascending the stairs from the main entrance brings one front to a gallery containing what is considered one of the most treasured collections held by Harvard University. The room is host to hundreds of flower species rendered in glass. Produced over a period of fifty years by Rudolf and Leopold Blaschka, between 1886 and 1936, the glass flowers are meticulously realistic. Their colors, textures, and depth all confound perception, as though one beheld a gallery brimmed with incorruptible flowers, frozen within a second of their blossoming. Officially known as the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, it was the first president of the Harvard Botanical Museum, George Goodale, who commissioned the glass flowers as teaching aids that, unlike natural specimens, would not decay.
Production of the flowers began less than thirty years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, and frameworks such as natural selection rippled through the early institutionalization of botany as a scientific discipline. Sexual selection was the lens in which empirical rigor was inserted into a formerly feminized or hobbyist discipline, and the glass flowers captured this voyeuristic scrutiny. This Botanical Gazette article from 1894 expresses the authors’ excitement at the accuracy in which the flowers’ reproductive organs are rendered:
As far as the delicate fingers of the artists, guided by a most accurate knowledge of the complex structure of this flower-head could accomplish it, everything is present. The linear recurved scales of the involucre, the roseate rays showing even the styles (for in Aster the ray-flowers are fertile), the discoid or central flowers, are all clearly depicted. [. . .] The young buds, showing only the involucral scales, are very natural, while in the older buds the rays are erect, not having fully expanded, and all the discoid flowers show only their small rounded tops. In the fully developed heads the central flowers have opened, and the syngenesious stamens show their yellow anthers in the outer row or rows, as one head is older than another. Herein the artists have shown their wonderful skill.
Indeed, as one visits the glass flower collection, the darkened gallery, with its delicate lighting and humming humidifiers, the lush blooms lining each space overtake attention, but closer inspection reveals the diagrammatic displays labeling each specimen’s parts and functions. Magnified section models of each plants’ reproductive stages accompany the one-to-one holistic models, rendered in the same realism. The display of artistic mastery in which the glass is tempered into organic disguises so perfect to incite better scientific use than death-prone flowers, does evoke the question of whether the glass flowers belong more to the thing that is represented or to the system that begged such representation.
And this preoccupation with sexual definition and function falls within a contentious moment in history. Simultaneous with the realization of the glass flower collection, the then-presidents of Harvard University, Charles William Eliot and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, were promoting an eugenicist agenda. Both extolled racial purity, attempting to use their positions to curb immigration and promote the sterilization of certain groups. In 1912, Eliot was vice president of First International Eugenics Congress, and Lowell attempted to introduce policies in Harvard that would limit the enrollment of Jewish and Black students. Botany, along with the nascent disciplines of genetics and evolutionary studies, absorbed the delusion of purity and the anxiety of inferiority. The glass flowers, sterile objects with punctually reproductive emphasis, embodied the bourgeois sexual orientation of the time: formulaic, categorical, and stale.
Also a member of the same elite Boston family, poet Amy Lowell, the sister of Harvard President Lowell, was at that time writing erotic lesbian poetry using flower imagery. In her poems, especially appreciated in lines such as, I parted you from your leaves / Until you stood up like a white flower, the metaphor is abundantly clear today. However, Lowell was a mainstream and misread poet at her time, so the illusion in which such imagery remained strictly bound to the literal realm of flowers obfuscated the potential of an art of representation moved by synthesizing the artist’s desires with the sensorial realm of the represented. Flowers are good porters of this dilemma, of how desire and structure are displaced onto figurative art, because flowers are so often simply depicted as beautiful, flattened into images that fail to convey anything but.
As Lawrence Lowell was finalizing the acquisition of the Blaschka collection of glass flowers, receiving the expertly crafted samples and accommodating them within glass displays, Amy Lowell wrote her sex life through flowers. Whether she was inspired or repelled by the glass collection is undocumented, or even if she ever saw it. We may imagine the two siblings consumed by dreams of begonias with buds split by yellow tufts of ready pistils, one dissecting the proper reproductive order, the other with her face buried in the flowers. The importance of having one’s face buried in the essence of otherness is another ontological approach to representation, where the subject/object boundary blurs. Because the eyes are part of the face, sight is forfeited in the process of burying one’s face, and so is distance. Scent is flooded and disoriented, touch is everything. Emanuele Coccia writes in The Life of Plants,
To perceive the world in depth means to be touched and penetrated by it to the point of being changed and modified by it. For a sessile being, knowing the world coincides with a variation of its own form—a metamorphosis provoked by the outside. This is what one calls sex: the supreme form of sensibility, that which allows us to conceive of the other at the very moment when the other modifies our way of being and obliges us to go, to change, to become other. The flower is the appendage that makes it possible for plants [. . .] to accomplish the process of absorption and capture of the world.
Humans are not sessile beings (not in this sense at least) but it is useful to imagine one form of isolated positioning, where the discernment in our senses is the impediment to perceptual penetration. In the case of flowers, and what the glass flowers do get right, is that flowers aren’t singular appendages, and Coccia says so too. Instead, they are agglomerates of the senses, embodying the possibilities of interaction and reproduction. The flaw in the glass flowers is that the agglomerate is cut into categories, cycles, and functions, thus removing the flower from its parts, and consequently the emphatic moment in which the completeness of an organism is perceived by another. The same risk exists in image-making.
There is thus some excitement in the metaphor, but even more so in confusion. Amy Lowell successfully subverted the perceptual capacity of her contemporaries, producing pornographic art to which a straight audience was blind, yet beholden to. She posthumously received a Pulitzer Prize a year after her death in 1925, and her most lauded poem was the deceptively nationalistic though reckoning Lilacs, which begins:
Lilacs,
False blue,
White,
Purple,
Color of lilac,
You have forgotten your Eastern origin
Lilacs, brought to New England by settlers two hundred years before Lowell wrote this, now populously adorn every other lined spring yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adorning the backdrop to normalcy. But in the poet’s hands, flowers migrate and petals are veined by memory, capable of simultaneously recurring to nostalgia and the desire that ongoes each day. Both the subject and object are agglomerates, each retains wholeness, and the represented lies somewhere in the perceptual middle, floating above matter, like a wish.
The glass flowers also wish. In their dim gallery, climate-controlled, inside recreated 19th century wood and glass displays, they lie like a frozen dream conceived first by Linnaeus and carried by generations of naturalists who systemized flowers into reproductive organs. One may then take up the reading of poetry to understand the nightmare that stirred behind all this, the lesbian wantonness that fingered petals even under the weight of history. No longer shadowed by taboo, Lowell rises today as a leader of the Imagist poetry movement, so instead one may consider what now hides in the closet, and how figurative art may disserve hegemonic claims to knowledge and being understood. Defying sensorial discernment might be a way to make space.