Human Flower Project
Watercolor Amazon
A Brazilian foundation compiles the complete works of a pioneering botanical artist.
Margaret Mee
Photo: Tony Morrison
As the primates of East Africa had their scholar/advocate, Jane Goodall, the flowers of Brazil had Margaret Mee. Trained as a painter in her native England, Mee at age 42 moved with her husband to Sau Paulo, Brazil, and taught art. In 1958 she took the first of many expeditions into the Brazilian tropical forests and at age 49 found her vocation: to document, interpret, and conserve the jungle’s floral treasures.
Traveling with a gun and a box of watercolors, she produced “400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks, and 15 diaries” before the end of her life: a car crash in 1988.
In the 1950s, there wasn’t so much talk about biodiversity and habitat loss. Mee’s rapturous fascination with the Amazon’s flowers established her vision of ecology and helped her lead a conservation movement that, still struggling, survives her.
Thanks to Elizabeth Wynn-Jones for alerting us to an exciting new human flower project. The Margaret Mee Foundation in Brazil is preparing a book of Mee’s complete works (what art historians call a catalogue raisonne’). This bilingual volume will collect all of the artist’s watercolors and provide detailed information about the context and production of each piece.
False Bombax
Pseudobombax grandiflorum (Cav.) A. Robyns
Margaret Mee
Image: Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation
The task at this point is to locate all of Mee’s original watercolors. To this end, Wynn-Jones asks “If you have, or know of the whereabouts of, an original Margaret Mee work, please make contact with us through (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or through the Margaret Mee Office, The Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Surrey TW9 3AB, England, or through http://www.margaretmee.org.br”—it’s a venture of discoverery, worthy of Mee herself.
Here’s an interview with Margaret Mee wherein she describes both the disappearance of Amazon flowers and their allure.
“They’re extraordinarily aggressive, some of them. The bromeliads, that’s the pineapple family, have great thorns. In fact, they’re extremely difficult to collect, as you can imagine. They have hosts of creatures living in them, including scorpions, poisonous spiders, ants, well, almost… and even snakes in some cases. But of course, there are the others which are so beautiful, delicate color, orchids, for instance, the Cattleya violacea, and the blue orchid, Acacallis cyanea, which is absolutely a dream.”