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The variations in the colors of the over 2,000 individual glass pieces are what make it seem so real. How many colors do you see?



Check out this video of how they installed the piece at the museum!

The exhibit itself begins with a collection of flower-like shapes that Chihuly calls Persians. The name, says Chihuly, "conjured up Near Eastern, Byzantine...smells, scents...it was...exotic."



What else do these shapes remind you of?

Farther on in the exhibit, there is an empty room where the ceiling is covered with a kaleidoscopic collection of Persians.



All different hues of light stream down into the room from above. I love the unique perspective on the artwork here. It reminds me of looking at trees. You have to take a moment to look up and see the beauty that is high above your head. You might even want to lay down and play a little "I Spy" with your friends.



In the middle of the exhibit, you arrive in a fantastical undersea world full of weeds and flowers and trees and creatures, all in the most vibrant colors you can imagine.



This installation is enormous! The group of figures fill a space that is 58 feet long and the tallest pieces are 11 feet high! Chihuly calls these installations Mille Fiori, which means "thousand flowers" in Italian and is also the term for a type of glasswork used to make colorful vases and jewelry. Some of the forms that Chihuly includes in his Mille Fiori installations are called Reeds, Herons, Towers, Pods, and Seal Pups. Can you find them?

The final piece in the exhibit is called Neodymium Reeds and is a simple and subtle combination of lavender glass rods and birch tree logs.

Those are real tree trunks! I find it so intriguing that the trees here are horizontal and the rods are vertical. Have the trees fallen? Are these reeds growing out of decaying trunks? Or are they a new order of trees, overtaking the old? They're so perfect and bright, while the birch bark is so flaky, uneven and dull. What do you think about the combination of real items from nature and these surreal glass forms?

Chihuly enjoys this juxtaposition, often placing his works in the outdoors. He installed Amber Cattails in the narrow gardens that separate the MFA's new atrium from its original building.



They look like they're just growing right alongside the trees and shrubs. And yet, they're so strange. Do you think they look like they belong in nature or not?



In recent years, Chihuly has put on dozens of installations at Botanical Gardens throughout America and abroad. Let's take a peek at one installation he did at Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. I love this little home made video. It gives you a genuine feeling of what it's like to walk through an outdoor installation like this. Keep an eye open for the glass works - sometimes it's hard to tell what's nature and what is glass!



I love thinking about the fact that it will rain or snow on these things. Just like real trees, real flowers, and real reeds, they are delicate and magical things that must survive the weather every day. How strong do you think these glass pieces are? How strong do you think the trees and the flowers are?

Chihuly's works really impress me in that they seem to have the capacity to excite children as much as adults. It's no surprise that a children's museum has actually dedicated permanent exhibit space, complete with hands-on activities, to one of Chihuly's works.


Fireworks of Glass at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis
picture by Intiaz Rahim

Back in Boston, as we make our way to the lunchroom at the MFA, we are in for one last little - no, a big - surprise. An enormous tree mural!

This is the product of the museum's community arts initiative, in which young students from several Boston-area Boys and Girls clubs worked together with artist Raul Gonzalez. They looked at images of family portraits from the museum's collection and set about making their own.

The kids added treasured items to their displays and put them all together into a wonderful family tree connecting many families and many traditions. What would your family tree look like? What kind of a family tree do you think Chihuly would make?

Perhaps when we get back to school, we'll draw some trees, some fantastical and some familial. For some more inspiration, check out this blog about drawing trees: How to draw a tree. It is full of amazing images, capturing the colors and shapes and wonder of trees. I can't stop reading it!

The one is on the side.



These have tiny little stems.



And these seem to be growing between two branches.



Overall, these sticky burrs remain a mystery. What's frustrating me is that I don't really see the ones on my tree developing into anything. And I haven't discovered any new ones in a while. So I'm wondering if these maybe aren't quite what I thought they were. Is it possible that these are just leftovers from last fall? Perhaps they're not the beginning of anything, but the end. They could be withered leaves. Which might explain why some of them have stems. And why they are all brown and dry looking.  (Because I would expect new, spring leaves to be green.) Hmmmm...

I wish something else would happen to give me a clue!

We first see John James as a young man with his father in the lush green French countryside. And we learn that what John James most loved to do was watch birds.



Next we see him in the white, snowy Pennsylvania woods. We learn that he was sent to America to learn commerce and to avoid fighting in Napoleon's war.



But what John James mostly does is watch the pewee birds and wonder if the birds he would see with the coming of the spring would be the same ones who had built the nests the previous year.



As he wonders about the birds, we watch the seasons pass, marked on one page by four simple little drawings of a single tree changing. These pictures, like the ones above, really show how much we understand the seasons through trees.



John James comes up with the novel idea to band a baby Phoebe bird with some silver thread to try to identify it if it returns the next year. He waits for the beginnings of spring and return of the birds.



When the birds arrive, he is delighted to discover that the birds he'd watched and studied and drawn in his little cave were indeed the same ones who returned to the cave the following year. And the baby bird he'd marked with the silver thread had established its own nest nearby. I love how Davies frames Audubon's question about the birds as the wonderings of a young boy far from his home, unsure if he'll ever return.

Davies also writes about Audubon's drawings, emphasizing how he studied and came to know his subjects by drawing and painting them. After having to do a few drawings of my own for science class, it's nice to see how effective this very direct and observational approach can be.



And it turns out he might not have liked his drawings much more than I like mine. That's reassuring too.

In the spirit of John James, the education section of the Audubon society's website contains tips on incorporating nature into family time. The Audubon society aims to help kids battle what some are calling a developing nature deficit disorder. For example, they sponsor an annual backyard bird count, an example of citizen science that collects info from volunteers everywhere, who watch for birds over a four-day period and provide a snapshot of bird life in the country. The website also contains tips for teachers for bringing nature into the classroom and teaching outdoors.

What amazes me is how this whole bud system seems to arrange itself in threes. I've already noticed that the branches coming off the twigs come out in pairs - that is to say, there'll be the center branch of the twig and then two branches coming off of it in opposite directions. Like this: \ I / . Three. Furthermore, the tip of each twig has a center bud and then a bud on either side of it - 3 buds. And now I see that each bud itself is made of 3 little parts, the inner bud and the two wings. Three. It's a magic number. Is that the key to understanding this tree?

Coincidentally, the buds on my tree seem to be in three different stages. I took a few minutes to draw them.



Some of the buds on the tips of the twigs of my tree still look like one single pointy bud (#1 above), but most of the ones I can see near my window look like #2. I'm assuming they're opening. Bud # 3 is the only one of its kind I can see on the tree and it is amazing! From my window it looks like a bud that is either cracking open or being pushed to the side and has something resembling the sticky burr texture inside or behind it. But with the camera, it is even more intriguing.



And the super, mega, ultra close-up is insane.



OMG, What is that stuff in the middle?! Is that the sticky burr thing uncurling? Is that growing from the inside of the bud? And what is that long thing on the side of it? A leaf? Some part of the twig? Did it come from the bud or was it already there?

Wow. And I thought they were just buds.

There's really a lot going on in just this tiny bit that I drew. The bark on the trunk and the large horizontal branch is really rough and mossy looking. It looks like it's full of cracks like paint peeling. The long ridges in the bark run along the length of the branch like poorly built parallel streets, rarely straight, but rarely crossing or meeting.

As a part of my tree-watching assignment, I am supposed to pick one specific twig on my tree and watch it particularly in order to get a close up look at the changes that are happening. Sometimes you can't see the twig for the trees, you know! In order to get to know my twig well, I chose to draw it. It extends towards me off the branch I've drawn above at the point I've labeled with a teeny tiny asterisk.



One thing I noticed while drawing this was just how symmetrical the little branches are on this twig. I couldn't get the perspective right, but there'll be a pair coming out on either side from about the same point and then the next pair will be coming out opposite from each other and usually 90 degrees offset from the first pair. I wonder what causes branches to grow like that. Our textbook suggests that through drawing, "children begin to realize what they know and what they don't know."[3] I don't know why branches grow the way they do. Is it totally random? I did notice that most of the tips of each tiny branch of my twig seem to have three buds - one at the very tip and one on either side. This seems like it could be the reason for the symmetrical branching. The center bud continues the main center branch and the two on the sides become the two new branches going off in opposing directions. So what happened where there aren't two opposing branches? Was there no bud there for some reason? Why are there some branches with just one or two buds at the tip? Did something happen to the second or third buds there? Did they start growing and then break off?

Now, in case my drawings haven't been quite as meaningful to you as they were to me (my textbook comforts me here a little too: "the sloppy or incomplete appearance of a particular science drawing may belie the role that creating it played in helping [one] to learn"[4]), here's my twig in multicolored megapixels for you.



The photo really captures the different color of this branch from the main one. It is also amazingly smooth. I am guessing that it's because this branch is newer and younger. As you move away from the main branches, the smaller branches get smoother and lighter in color. Will they look like the larger branch there in ten years?

(You might notice that I'm highlighting my questions as I'm writing about my tree. I might want to come back to them, so I thought it would be helpful to make them easier to find in a post.)

[1] Doris, E. (2010). Doing What Scientists Do. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. p. 113
[2] Doris, p. 128.
[3] Doris, p. 113.
[4] Doris, p. 128.