Foreigners were generously welcomed into Emile Gallé's enormous majolica, cabinet-making and glass-making workshop by a hospitable gardener. He told them about the plants on the way to the shop, surrounded by tall trees that created a realm of peace and tranquility providing guidance for the items produced in this place. It was at the height of the end of the century, not long after the formulation of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin, that Gallé's contemporaries strove to demonstrate that the opposite process was also possible, that humanity was capable of both regression as much as evolution. (3) Art Nouveau shared this concern with natural plant forms, especially branches of botany and biology as they overlap with esoteric spiritual ideas. Gallé hovers between these two sides, fusing the natural symbolism of objects with the physical technology of creation that surpasses decoration. Gallé's pieces have never been an end point in themselves but a symbiotic guide. Faced with design problems, Gallé wondered "how nature had solved the problem"(1). It is quite easy for designers to lose sight of the object in the midst of its creation and stray from its original purpose and appropriateness. Starting from his carpentry work, he claimed to follow a linear inspiration in which the joints should be neither masked nor hidden but grow as the stem of a plant divides. To do this he used marquetry, sheets of wood veneer put together like a puzzle (5), in which he subtly blended floral themes into a natural landscape. Everything is then superimposed on a thicker support. The process was essentially built piece by piece until it became an object that became both decoration and... half of paper..., soon falling apart under the weight of its olives, shaped in crystal. the color of tasty nephrite."(4) I see these human qualities that Gallé attributes to nature through his suggestive words to be exactly mirrored by the natural growth processes that determine the method by which he controls the chemical and technical glass processes used to represent this which can only be suggestive of natural forms. This process was a linear attachment, as Gallé was a present mediator for both, paying close attention to what the object desired as it was made. His pieces were never an end point themselves and because of this they had the power to transcend different cultural backgrounds. There was instead a universal nature in the intuitive familiarity for a mysterious exoticism through the simple hybridity of natural techniques performed by a craftsman who depicted the fleeting moments of nature..