A poem of glass flowers and Richard Evans Schultes

(poem at the bottom)

It was in a Wade Davis book about the plants of the Amazon that I read about Davis' famous teacher, Richard Evans Schultes, who was also the mentor of interesting guys like biologist E.O. Wilson, physician Andrew Weil, psychologist Daniel Goleman, poet Allen Ginsberg, and authors Alejo Carpentier and William S. Burroughs....


- Schultes in the Amazon

.... here's a little about Schultes from Wikipedia --

"Richard Evans Schultes (SHULL-tees) (January 12, 1915 – April 10, 2001) may be considered the father of modern ethnobotany, for his studies of indigenous peoples' (especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas) uses of plants, including especially entheogenic or hallucinogenic plants (particularly in Mexico and the Amazon), for his lifelong collaborations with chemists, and for his charismatic influence as an educator at Harvard University .... His book The Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers (1979), co-authored with chemist Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, is considered his greatest popular work ....

A Harvard student himself from 1934 to 1941, Schultes studied with Oakes Ames, orchidologist and Director of the Harvard Botanical Museum .... The first of many prolonged trips to the Upper Amazon began in 1941 as a Harvard Research Associate, and included a search for wild disease-resistant rubber species in an effort to free the United States from dependence on Southeast Asian rubber plantations which had become unavailable due to Japanese occupation in World War II ..... Schultes' botanical fieldwork among Native American communities led him to be one of the first to alert the world about destruction of the Amazon rainforest and the disappearance of its native people. He collected over 30,000 herbarium specimens (including 300 species new to science) and published numerous ethnobotanical discoveries including the source of the dart poison known as curare, now commonly employed as a muscle relaxant during surgery .... Schultes became Curator of Harvard's Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium in 1953, Curator of Economic Botany in 1958, and Professor of Biology in 1970."

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- a glass flower from The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. You can more about the collection in this NPR story - At Corning, Art That Imitates Life — Astonishingly. Here's a poem mentioned in the article ....

The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum by Mark Doty

Strange paradise, complete with worms,
monument of an obsessive will to fix forms;
every apricot or yellow spot's seen so closely,
in these blown blooms and fruit, that exactitude
is not quite imitation. Leaf and root,
the sweet flag's flaring bud already,
at the tip, blackened; it's hard to remember
these were ballooned and shaped by breath
they're lovely because they seem
to decay; blue spots on bluer plums,
mold tarring a striped rose. I don't want to admire
the glassblower's academic replica,
his copies correct only to a single sense.
And why did a god so invested in permanence
choose so fragile a medium, the last material
he might expect to last? Better prose
to tell the forms of things, or illustration.
Though there's something seductive in this impossibility:
transparent color telling the live mottle of peach,
the blush or tint of crab, englobed,
gorgeous, edible. How else match that flush?
He's built a perfection out of hunger,
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can't be swallowed, won't yield
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear.