Ambato

This year I have travelled very far from home, but somehow home found its way back to me. When you leave a city that has been your home for ten years, you notice when it comes up - in conversation with people you meet, in the news, in literature. It is not hard to be reminded of Berlin, but still I took note when the name looked back at me from a label in Ambato in Ecuador, at the Museo Héctor Vásquez Salazar housed in the Colegio Nacional Bolívar. The label was attached to a Brendel model - an enlarged model of a flower once part of a teaching collection. 

Brendel models can be taken apart and reassembled, allowing students to perform something like a botanical dissection without destroying a living plant - like LEGO flowers only with more scientific accuracy. Enlarged details made structures visible that would otherwise have required a microscope, while the flower could be studied regardless of season, location or the rapid decay of organic material.¹ Put simply, students using the models could play a game of “He loves me, He loves me not”, or more accurately “I know it, I know it not” and hopefully landing on knowing the plant at the end. 

In Ambato, several botanical teaching models stood together in a glass case, mounted on the characteristic black bases typical of the firm’s Berlin period. Among the flowers was a particularly striking model labelled Phytophthora infestans. Rather than representing a beautiful blossom, it showed a stage of the pathogen responsible for potato late blight. Brendel catalogues included models of fungi and bacteria as well as agricultural crops, plant infections and different stages in the development of pathogens.² Comparable models of Phytophthora infestans survive in the collections of the World Museum Liverpool and the Botanical Museum of the University of Greifswald. This model in particular offers an example of how German scientists and model makers created tools to better understand and improve the productivity of homegrown and overseas flora, in this case to prevent the disease of an Andean plant, the potato.

Why was I surprised to find these models made in Berlin in a small school museum in Ambato? The world at this moment in time is as globalized as never before, but as my team and I witnessed in Ecuador, it is still isolated in spheres of more or less influence and access. I was surprised to find something crafted in the city I had called home exhibited so far away, but I shouldn’t have been. The epistemic uncertainty of not knowing a plant, or plant disease, was to be remedied by Brendel’s models. This pursuit of knowledge was connected to a larger project: the standardization of science bringing along the development and exploitation of land located thousands of kilometers away from Europe, the center from where influence, access and authority radiated. 

Brendel and «teaching plants»

The history of the Brendel models does not begin with their creator Robert Brendel himself. It begins around 1860 with the botanical teaching undertaken by Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, today’s Wrocław. For his classes, the local pharmacist Carl Leopold Lohmeyer developed enlarged representations of plant structures following Cohn’s instructions. Cohn incorporated the objects into his teaching together with specimens and other forms of visual explanation. Interest from additional educational establishments soon created an opportunity to reproduce the models for a wider market. In 1866, Robert Brendel took up their commercial production.³

Brendel initially offered a set of thirty flower models intended to familiarize students with important European plants, including violet, lily, and poppy. From these relatively modest beginnings, the company developed an extensive range that eventually encompassed flowers, fruits and seeds; mosses, ferns and algae; plant anatomy and cellular structures; medicinal and poisonous plants; agricultural crops; bacteria and fungi; and models illustrating plant diseases.⁴

They were constructed from a mixture of materials. Depending on the model, the makers worked with substances ranging from molded paper and plaster to textiles, wire, wood, gelatine and small glass elements. Reusable molds facilitated serial production, but considerable manual work remained necessary: individual components had to be joined, colored and given a protective finish. Their combination of relatively inexpensive materials, light weight and durability made them more accessible to educational institutions than many elaborate wax, plaster or glass models.⁵

Brendel worked first in Breslau before moving the company to Berlin. Following Robert Brendel’s death in 1898, his son Reinhold continued the business and expanded its range. The firm’s known catalogues document a considerable expansion of its program: the 1925 offering covered 164 species and comprised close to 300 separate models or model components.⁶ The models were also the products of a wider scientific network. Robert Brendel collaborated with botanists and specialists, who advised the company, supplied drawings and explanations, and lent their scientific authority to particular models and series.⁷

Brendel reached prospective customers both directly, by advertising the models in catalogues and handling orders by post, and indirectly, through educational suppliers in different countries. The company also presented its models at major world’s fairs like Paris in 1867 and Chicago in 1893 receiving international recognition. These exhibitions also helped the company extend its commercial reach beyond Europe.⁸  Dealers in cities including Florence, Prague and Philadelphia helped move the models between manufacturers and buyers. The firm’s customers were schoolteachers, university departments, museums and institutions concerned with agriculture and forestry. The models eventually reached institutions across Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand.⁹

Auckland

In August, my research took me even further away from home to Auckland. As I enjoyed the cold winter rain of New Zealand after a summer of punishing heat in Europe, I made my way to the He Māra Mahara, Cultural Collections at the Auckland University Library. And there, waiting to be noticed behind glass were Brendel models, again. Here they were shown as part of a small exhibition, “Evergreen: the art and science of plants”, with well-written texts and further contextualization. 

They were described as curious artefacts, an exhibition label read: “The University is among several institutions globally which holds a collection of curious and enchanting Brendel Botanical models.” These models that could be taken apart were presented as a curious way of learning about plants. And this surprised me, because growing up, when I wanted to understand a plant growing in the garden or the forest, much to the dismay of my parents, I would take them apart too. By showing the models next to more traditional ways of studying plants - such as botanical illustrations and herbaria- the exhibition in Auckland singled Brendel’s flowers out as a different way of teaching students how plants function. 

The collection in Auckland can be traced to Algernon Thomas, one of the four founding professors of Auckland University College. An entry dated 16 March 1900 in Thomas’s letter book lists several Brendel models, including two models displayed in the 2026 exhibition. A historical photograph of Thomas’s laboratory also shows botanical and zoological teaching objects arranged in cabinets, with the Brendel models visible among them.¹⁰

The models in Auckland were therefore not incidental objects acquired for their curiosity or beauty. Around 1900, they formed part of the material infrastructure through which biological teaching was being established at a young university.¹¹ Their journeys were inseparable from the colonial world through which scientific objects and botanical knowledge circulated. Australasian teaching collections were connected to supply routes reaching back to European manufacturers. Universities and museums obtained these objects through dealers, institutional contacts and other structures of colonial exchange.¹² They offered the authority of European laboratories, classifications and teaching practices, even though many of the species they represented did not occur where students studied them.¹³

Destruction and Reassembly

In Auckland, the models’ presence raises a question that the exhibition only begins to answer: what happened when models of mainly European plants were used to teach botany in places with radically different - and already deeply known - local floras? In Ambato, I did not initially question the models as a learning tool to understand the workings of a flower or a pathogen that affects a crop from the Andes, but I wanted to learn more about who had made them and how they were connected to Berlin. I wanted to reassemble a lost connection to a place I know so well.  

Yet the Ambato display also complicates any straightforward story of provenance. The case is labelled “Material didáctico de botánica - Francia,” although individual models carry Brendel’s Berlin label. The display may combine objects made by different manufacturers; the models may have reached Ecuador through a French dealer; or “France” may be a later and imprecise museum attribution.¹⁴ Or, the models simply depict plants that typically grow in France. The difference in presentation to the Auckland exhibition and this uncertainty about the object’s provenance is striking. In Ambato, the collection is largely managed and cared for by one person. Other museums take part in a global exchange with other collections that house Brendel models.¹⁵ But I think it is possible that at the Museo Héctor Vásquez Salazar the importance of botanical models depicting mainly European flora is less central compared to the maintenance and care for decaying specimens of animals from Ecuador and Ambato specifically that are endangered or extinct.

My encounters with Brendel’s flowers were not coincidental in a strict sense. What shapes scientific research on our environment and on ourselves today are the continuities of epistemic injustice and an imbalance of access and attention. My attention is grabbed by reading familiar names on labels, because of my personal connection, my identity as a European academic and current research interests. To find these connections between material objects in museum collections you still need to cross oceans and be in the right place, at the right time. It is still a game of picking petals, but the game wouldn’t be possible without holding the flower in your hands. 

Who was and is allowed to pick flowers in the garden of science and what will be done with the answers after the flowers are picked apart? Is a digital scan of a Brendel model the same as the real thing, and how do we ensure that the knowledge we produce today is accessible in the future? Is it possible to close the gap between knowledge of firsthand experience and representations of it in a digital way so that unequal access can be remedied? Or will it always be necessary to gain the privilege to travel and be surprised by unexpected connections?

Brendel’s flowers did travel far and wide and communicated things that were not accessible by hands picking apart tiny petals and stems without microscopic sight. Some knowledge has to have more dimensions than an illustration, has to be experienced by destruction and reassembly. Some dimensions can only be understood by zooming in, and some places only by moving far away. Sometimes, the networks of the past reveal themselves to us very unexpectedly and suddenly are not past at all. They just wait to be found again. 

--- 

References

1. Tschirch 1885, pp. III–IV; Fiorini, Maekawa and Stiberc 2008, pp. 35–37; Mayoni 2026, pp. 20–21, 26–27.
2. Mayoni 2026, pp. 20–24.
3. Mayoni 2026, pp. 5–7.
4. Mayoni 2026, pp. 7–8, 20–24.
5. Fiorini, Maekawa and Stiberc 2008, pp. 36–37, 44; Mayoni 2026, pp. 6–7, 26.
6. Mayoni 2026, pp. 10, 24–25.
7. Mayoni 2026, pp. 15–24.
8. Fiorini, Maekawa and Stiberc 2008, pp. 37–38; Mayoni 2026, pp. 8–10.
9. Fiorini, Maekawa and Stiberc 2008, p. 37; Mayoni 2026, pp. 9–10, 22–24.
10. University of Auckland 2026, exhibition label; University of Auckland 2026, p. 11.
11. University of Auckland 2026, exhibition label.
12. Brazier and Duggins 2015; Mayoni 2026, p. 10.
13. Brazier and Duggins 2015. 
14. It is also possible that designer, manufacturer and distributor did not always coincide. Some plant-pathology models associated with Brendel, for instance, appear to have been designed or manufactured by Paul Osterloh and subsequently sold through Brendel’s commercial network, Mayoni 2026, pp. 13–14.
15. Like this survey by Donna Young of the World Museum in Liverpool: https://natsca.blog/2019/08/01/brendel-plant-model-survey/ 

Sources

Brazier, Jan; Duggins, Molly: “Visualising Nature: Models and Wall Charts for Teaching Biology in Australia and New Zealand”, in: reCollections 10, no. 2, 2015.

Fiorini, Graziana; Maekawa, Luana; Stiberc, Peter: “Save the Plants: Conservation of Brendel Anatomical Botany Models”, in: The Book and Paper Group Annual 27, 2008, p. 35–45.

Mayoni, María Gabriela: “The Brendel Botany Models: Scientific Networks and Global Strategies in 19th-Century Production”, in: Nuncius, 2026, p. 1- 27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-bja10202.

Tschirch, Alexander: Erläuterungen zu den botanischen Modellen von Robert Brendel in Berlin W., 101 Kurfürstendamm, Berlin: Gebrüder Unger, 1885.

University of Auckland: “The Art and Science of Our Natural World”, in: UniNews, August 2026, p. 11. PDF: https://www.auckland.ac.nz/assets/about-us/about-the-university/the-university/official-publications/uninews/2026/august-2026/104-26_Uninews_august_2026-web.pdf 

University of Auckland: Exhibition labels for Evergreen: The Art and Science of Plants, He Māra Mahara Cultural Collections, 2026.