Louis Bierweiler Outlasts Everything but His Glass Flowers

Just to the left of the fourth floor of the University Botanical Museum is a good-sized room with the name "Louis C. Bierweiler" printed on the door. At the far end of the room, placed end-wise between two large windows, is an oversized table. On this, beneath a hanging fluorescent light, is a raised platform 19 1/2 inches by 27 1/2 inches. Here Bierweiler works, and has worked for the past 53 years.

It all began back in the 1880's, when Cleveland was President of the United States, Eliot was President of Harvard, and you had to take a horse and buggy to get from Cambridge to Boston. Professor George L. Goodale was the director of the Botanical Museum then. He was trying to open the field of economic botany--the area that ties plants in with man's food, clothing, and shelter--and plant physiology. In addition, he was a strong rival of the Zoology Department and most jealous of their exhition of jelly fish and other marine life done in glass.

Here he found the answer to complaints about the impracticability of dried, wax, papiermache, and alcohol-preserved flowers. Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, father and son, were expert practitioners of their Bohemian ancestors' glass artistry. Goodale went to Germany and persuaded them to take some time away from their lucrative marine work and devote it to the field of botany, which they had invaded before.

Not only did the Blaschkas decide to divide their time, but in a few years they gave it all to the creation of glass flowers. Inasmuch as their previous adventure in the field, specimens of orchids, were destroyed in a fire at Liege, Belgium, in 1868.

Goodale then had to provide for taking care of the glass flowers. He hired a boy who was born in 1886, the same year the director first talked to the Blaschkas. The youngster, Louis Charles Bierweiler, was 14 when he came to work as Goodale's assistant in 1901.

Bierweiler was put right to work. The first glass flower to be shipped to this country was damaged in the Customs House in New York. It had to be repaired, mounted, and put on display.

All together there are 847 models of plants representing 169 families. Each required months of study, drawings, and work--the Blaschkas often travelled around the world for native specimens. The models are made of colored glass sometimes drawn as fine as a hair. Their care is Bierweiler's life work.

His primary concern is with the exhibition collections, and here his value has been the greatest. Every glass flower must be mounted for display, and Bierweiler has perfected the technique. Each is set on a plaster of Paris plaque, poured amazingly smooth on a sheet of glass. The flower, of course, is extremely fragile and must be buttressed in several places. Bierweiler makes plaster supports which fit under stems, leaves, or petals wherever necessary without obstructing anything. Then, with a dentist's drill, he makes a fine hole in the plaster through which he runs a thin silver wire to tie down the delicate spray. The system is not only artistically beautiful but efficient. The plant is always turned to catch the light perfectly. While the flowers are continually being cleaned and freshened, there has been no damage from vibration despite the lumbering trucks that patrol Oxford St.

More than 300,000 visitors and students come to see the glass flowers every year--the specimens that Bierweiler mounts, catalogues, and preserves. On the 50th anniversary of his unique service his friends held a celebration at the Faculty Club in his honor. To commemorate his half century of devotion they presented him with a government bond and an illuminated scroll which proclaims the University's debt to him.