Chihuly's world is one of kaleidoscopic glass

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — A star burst of yellow glass cones hanging from an oak tree makes an unlikely forest chandelier. Red reeds rise from the cactus garden. And where the macaws fly low, the pink crags are piled like a massive tower of rock candy.

Dale Chihuly's work has transformed the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, adding spheres of multicolored glass to ponds where lily pads once floated alone and kaleidoscopic columns to patches of green. The reach of the world's premier glassblower extends far beyond the cycads and palms of Coral Gables, though, to the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to Jerusalem and to Seoul.

And before Fairchild, Chihuly showed his creations at the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.

Like Louis Comfort Tiffany and Rene Lalique before him, Chihuly has helped elevate what often is thought simply as a craft to a fine art and captivated millions who've seen his work. Count among them Bruce Greer, president of the board of trustees at Fairchild, who was instrumental in bringing Chihuly's work here two years in a row.

"The predominant word, from intellectuals to children is the same: Wow," Greer said.

Sixty-five, with paint-splattered shoes, a bush of curly hair and a black patch over his left eye, Chihuly (pronounced chuh-HOO-lee) was born in Tacoma, Wash., to a butcher-turned-union organizer father and homemaker mother. As a teenager, he lost his father to a heart attack and his brother to a Navy plane crash. He was depressed but reluctantly enrolled in college at his mother's insistence.

He had decided to pursue a life in interior design and architecture but learned to melt glass and did some innovative work incorporating it into woven tapestries. He was in his mid-20s and had never seen glass blown when he first picked up a pipe and tried it.

"I'm just amazed that there was this bubble at the end of the pipe," he said from his Seattle studio. "From that point on, I wanted to be a glassblower."

In four decades since, he has regenerated the artistic view of glass more than anyone else since Tiffany garnered attention with stained-glass windows and lamps a century ago. He has shattered what the public thought possible with the medium, building bigger, more complex pieces than ever before.