Flora and Sylva
As we continue to progress through our gift processing, we came across this pleasant little item from an anonymous donor: Glass Flowers from the Ware Collection in the Botanical Museum of Harvard University; Insect Pollination Series, published in New York by Harcourt, Brace and Company in 1940. Now housed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, this remarkable collection of flower facsimiles was commissioned by Prof. George Lincoln Goodale, financed by Elizabeth C. Ware and her daughter Mary Lee Ware as a gift to the Harvard University, and produced entirely in glass by the German artisans Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka from 1887 to 1936.
According to this slim publication, the Ware Collection “contains specimens illustrating 164 families of flowering plants, a selected group of cryptogams illustrating complicated life-histories, a group of models exhibiting the relation of insects to the transference of pollen, and a group of rosaceous fruits illustrating the effect of fungus diseases.” More information about the collection along with a video on the collection’s restoration can be found at the Harvard Museum of Natural History website.
This small book focuses on the pollination series of the Ware Collecton, and includes color reproductions of sixteen paintings of the glass facsimiles by the noted German-American artist and illustrator Fritz Kredel, who’s woodcuts we highlighted yesterday in our Typography Tuesday post.