The Glass Orchard

Driving from Ames to Des Moines last week, my friend Tom told me about Harvard’s Glass Flowers — more officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants. It’s a fascinating story. They

…are a set of approximately 3,000 life-size models of plants made out of glass, with occasional bits of wire, paint, and glue. The collection is owed by Harvard University, where the models are on display in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. George Lincoln Goodale, the first director of the Harvard Botanical Museum, commissioned the models in 1886 from Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, a father and son team of glassmakers based in Hosterwitz, near Dresden. The Blaschkas produced the models over 50 years, Leopold until his death in 1895 and Rudolph until his retirement at age 79 in 1936.

They’re not just beautiful, they’re supposed to be useful too, aids to the study of tropical botany in particular.

There are many fruits and fibers in the collection, Rossi-Wilcox explained, ((Susan Rossi-Wilcox is a curatorial associate at the Botanical Museum.)) as well as other “useful” plants. “The Botanical Museum’s whole mission is ‘economic botany.’ Cotton, silk, the food we eat … We’re this odd little sister of taxonomy. The point of making this collection was to make people understand plants that were common in their lives.”

Some of the latest — and the best — of the Blaschka models are the series Rudolf made on the diseases of fruit trees. The “rotten fruit” series, Rossi-Wilcox affectionately called them. “They are the most spectacular models he made,” she said. “They’re animated, realistic. The cut sections don’t have the mealiness of real disease, but as fruit, he’s got it — all the little weirdnesses of the colors. Anyone who has fruit trees has seen these things.

I can’t find a full list of the “164 plant families, totaling 847 species and plant varieties” represented by the models. But I have found photographs of Musa paradisiaca, Prunus armeniaca and Gossypium herbaceum. And there is also an Emperor Alexander Apple “affected by apple scab disease”. So agrobiodiversity seems to be well represented.

Nibbles: Pluots, Village chickens, Axolotl, Artisanal fishing, Fruit and climate change, Stamps, Hornless cattle, Artemisin for malaria, Aquatic agroecosystems characterization, Speciation and ploidy

Nibbles: Gardening, Maple syrup, Farming and conservation, Late blight, Urban guerrilla, Bizarre produce, Russian food, Aquaculture, Heirloom apples, Turkish medicinal plants, Bee-eating hornets

Nibbles: Seed travels, Carotenoids in cucumbers, Tea and hibiscus, Sea level rise, Tewolde on climate change, SPGRC

No little houses on this prairie

I promised you more on the Doolittle Prairie, and here it is. But first, thanks to Candy Gardner for arranging the visit, and to Mark Widrlechner for leading the tour.

Doolittle Prairie State Preserve, near Story City in Iowa, is a small remnant of native tallgrass prairie. The 26-acre state-owned protected area supports about 220 plant species. ((You can download a prairie species dataset from Dr Brian J Wisley’s webpage. Look among his publications for: Wilsey, B.J. Martin, L.M. and H.W. Polley. 2005a. Predicting plant extinction based on species-area curves in prairie fragments with high beta richness. Conservation Biology. 19:1835-1841.)) About half of the area, the northern part, has never been ploughed or grazed, though hay was cut until the 60s. The southern part has been grazed, and the southwest corner ploughed until 1965 and then replanted with seed from the northern section. All around are fields of maize and soybean. Management is by cutting and burning, to keep down exotics, and encroaching shrubs and trees.

me

It’s a very evocative place. You can just imagine the deer and the buffalo roaming on it back in the day. There are still deer. Buffalo, not so much. ((Though I did see buffalo nearby.)) It’s also pretty interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective, because it’s got quite a number of crop wild relatives for such a small place.

A couple of species of wild sunflowers, for example. This one is Helianthus rigidus:

helianthus

There are also native species of Allium, Elymus, Lactuca, Fragaria, Prunus, Ribes, Rubus, and Vitis:

vitis

All in a beautifully colorful setting, at least at this time of the year.

general view

So, a bit of a CWR hotspot, in its own small way, and protected to boot. You may remember the recent global review of the role of protected areas in CWR conservation. I don’t think that CWR have been mapped in the US in the same way as has been done in Russia, however. ((They have, however, been inventoried. See Appendix A of the United States country report for the first State of the World Report. Thanks to Karen for the tip.)) Once you have geo-referenced CWR locations, you could easily mash the result up with the online map of protected areas to see which national parks and reserves contribute most to CWR conservation. Anybody out there working on this? I bet little Doolittle Prairie would be on that list.

rainbow