FROM THE editors November 17, 2003 Issue

Glass flowers—and thinking for yourself

Written for children

Mary Trammell

The New York Times Magazine

When I was a little girl in Boston, my mom used to take me and my friends to see the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. There are over 4,000 of them. They were made a long time ago in Dresden, Germany, by a father and son—Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. It took them 50 years to make them all!

These glass flowers are amazing. Each one is different. There are yellow black-eyed Susans. Gray-green ferns. Roses of every color.

And they look SO REAL. You can almost see them swaying in the breeze.

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