For the last eight years, I’ve been slowly renovating my little, post-war home into an environmentally-friendly mecca (or so I like to think, anyway).
I have, as much as possible, retro-fitted it for maximum sustainability–and one of the many ways I have achieved that is by sadly replacing the gorgeous antique, hand blown, opal glass lampshades with ceiling fans.
This season is also the first time I have grown a Blueberry bush and the first time I have seen a Blueberry flower. While I had my eyeball firmly glued to the viewfinder of my camera–staring ridiculously close at the tiny flower–I noticed the remarkable similarity the flowers had to the old glass lamp-shades. I wondered if the original lampshade designer was inspired by the blueberry flower?
Blueberry’s were grown originally in North America. Since the 1930’s cultivation had slowly spread across the world, however, more recently, only a hybrid version has made it available to be grown successfully in Australia. The lampshades, were hand-blown in the USA during the Victorian era. Many lampshade designs from that time look like a flower of some sort. Hence the thought occurred to me that the two may somehow share a link in design.
I pictured the designer viewing the flower up close, studying it in the same way as myself–and trotting off to their studio to hand-blow the glass to create a functional equivalent of the Blueberry flower’s form… which ended up in my little, post-war home.
Great thought.