Poem: ‘The Covert Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany’

On supporting science journalism

If you enjoy this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscription. By purchasing a subscription, you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

A century ago, a father and a son
worked to reproduce the complex
structure of nearly eight hundred
species of plants out of four thousand
delicate models. Leopold Blaschka
and his son Rudolph were masters
torch working, blowing and shaping
molten glass glistening on a torch
blue flame. Fame came to them
when Harvard University put the most
of the collection on permanent display
in its Natural History Museum.
What was kept under lock and key was
the monstrous Venturie uneven,
Deforming Taphrina, and a taste of
Monilinia fructigenaa grotesque
perversion of beauty called fruit
in decadence. For a few short months
the nineteenth year of this year,
the third millennium, just before
a global pandemic has ravaged
for humans, twenty examples emerged
peach leaf curl, pear scab, brown
rot and a whole pale microcosm
of Aspergillus leaving the office
ground in tiny zombie flesh trees.
Fungal bodies such as ferns, mosses,
algae and fungi spread
around by spores, so no longer an orchard
will share an infection, the signs said.
Detection always comes from the study
stains, spots, drying out and rot
in this gallery of fragile monsters, simulacra
of apples sharing a barrel of cultivated land
Latin names for diseases that are both so ancient
and relentless as time that withers, and yet
with a genius to flower again to reproduce
death in our Garden of Eden unleashed.

It’s time to defend science

If you enjoyed this article, I would like to ask for your support. Scientific American has been defending science and industry for 180 years, and we are currently experiencing perhaps the most critical moment in these two centuries of history.

I was a Scientific American subscriber since the age of 12, and it helped shape the way I see the world. SciAm always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of respect for our vast and beautiful universe. I hope this is the case for you too.

If you subscribe to Scientific Americanyou help ensure our coverage centers on meaningful research and discoveries; that we have the resources to account for decisions that threaten laboratories across the United States; and that we support budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.

In exchange, you receive essential information, captivating podcasts, brilliant infographics, newsletters not to be missed, unmissable videos, stimulating games and the best writings and reports from the scientific world. You can even offer a subscription to someone.

There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you will support us in this mission.