Harvard's most popular tourist attraction is not one of the hallmarks of University history--the John Harvard statue or Widener Library--but rather the breathtaking collection of Blaschka Glass models of plants, popularly called the "Glass Flowers."

Each year more than 100,000 people visit Cambridge expressly to view the glass flowers in their home in Harvard's Botanical Museum.

The plant replicas were the brainchild of George Lincoln Goddell, the museum's first director, who in 1886 began seeking perfect botanical replicas for a natural history exhibit. The quest ultimately led him to a pair of craftsmen in Dresden, Germany.

Goddell, concerned that his exhibit would be limited by the imperfect quality of the plant models, first experimented with way and paper-mach. But these materials tended to be rough and not keep well, and dried of preserved plants failed to converse the fresh look Goddell wanted.

Goddell hit upon a solution when he viewed glass reproductions of marine invertebrates in the zoological museum. He decided to commission the European father-and-son team who had created the models, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, to make similar glass plants for the museum.

At that time no one realized that the two men were beginning a 50-year project.

The completed collection contains 847 life-size pieces, with 780 varieties of plants in 164 families and more than 3000 detailed models of enlarged plant anatomical parts.

Transporting the flowers from Dresden was a delicate process. Each model was mounted on cardboard and secured with wire. It was the placed in a cardboard box that was well-padded with tissue paper. Workers placed these containers in large wooden boxes padded with tissue which was then wrapped in burlap. The resulting containers were more than wrapped in burlap. The resulting containers were more than five feet tall.

Today some tourists say the flowers appear so lifelike that one can almost smell their scent.

"How were the flowers made, and did the secret of their creation die with their makers?" are two of the questions posed most often by tourists.

The techniques used by the Blaschkas were known by all glass artisans of the time, one museum official says, but Harvard's flowers are generally considered both "an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art."

Hearse

Even with modern technology, safe transportation of the flowers remains an important concern.

In 1976 the Steuben Glass Company in New York held a month-long exhibit of 25 of the flowers. Administrators seeking the smoothest way to transport the flowers to Logan airport settled on a hearse.

Although the flowers were flown to New York, the ride to the airport was so smooth that they were driven the 200 miles back to Cambridge by hearse again.