Poem: The Covert Herbarium of Cryptogamic Botany'

"What was kept locked away were the monstrous Venturia inaequalis, Taphrina deformans, and a taste of Monilinia fructigena, a grotesqueperversion of beauty called fruitsin decay. For a few short monthsin the nineteenth year of this,the third millennium, just beforea worldwide pandemic laid wasteto humans, out came twenty examplesof peach leaf curl, pear scab, brownrot and a whole pale microcosm of Aspergillus rising from the cabinetfloor in tiny zombie-flesh trees."

"Cryptogamic bodies like ferns, mosses,algae and fungi spread themselvesaround by spore, so more of an orchardwill share an infection, the placards said.Detection still comes from studyingthe spots, dots, desiccations and rotin this fragile freaks' gallery, simulacraof apples sharing a barrel of cultivatedLatin names for diseases at once as oldand relentless as withering time, and yetwith a genius for budding afresh to breed death in our run-amuck Garden of Eden."

A century ago Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka replicated nearly eight hundred plant species in roughly four thousand delicate glass models using lampwork techniques. Harvard University placed most of the collection on permanent display while particularly grotesque models of plant diseases remained locked away. Shortly before a global pandemic, twenty disease examples were exhibited, including peach leaf curl, pear scab, brown rot, and Aspergillus specimens. The models show how cryptogamic organisms—ferns, mosses, algae, and fungi—spread by spores and create shared infections across orchards. Detection relies on observing spots, desiccations, dots, and rot in fragile specimens labeled with cultivated Latin disease names.

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