‘ Delight’ said Charles Darwin in his diaries in 1832, ‘is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest’. These feelings must have been those which drove Margaret Mee to explore the Brazilian jungles on numerous expeditions between 1958 and 1964, creating wonderful pictures despite all kinds of difficulties encountered in this hostile world. And these feelings were also those I had when I read this book: delight about her precise drawings and life-like paintings, which are extremely expressive from an artistic and also from a scientific point of view. Delight about her writing, which is lyrical and eloquent, fascinatingly unassuming and modest, exciting in what she tells and how she tells it. Reading this book brings up a pleasant mixture of reminiscences and wanderlust: I recognize many things I have seen myself on my expeditions to the Amazon, I recall experiences which I could never write down in such a lively way. The collection of photographs, paintings and texts presented in this book triggered in me the thought, ‘what a pity that I did not meet this wonderful, fascinating person. And when is the next plane to Amazonia leaving anyway?’.
The book is not only a brilliant collection of pictures, as many books about Margaret Mee's art before, but focuses on the life history of a very special person. Margaret Mee (1909–1988) was born in Chesham, England. She studied art in London and moved to Brazil in 1952 where she worked as a botanical artist at the Instituto de Botanica in São Paulo and explored the Amazon forest on 15 expeditions, between 1964 and 1988. She was always ‘In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forest’ (as is the title of one of her books published in 1988) and not only painted them, but collected them and found numerous new species—some have been named after her—and thus contributed consistently to the development of knowledge about the Amazon, and last and not least to an awareness for the need of its conservation. In 1988, after she died in a car crash in England, the Margaret Mee Amazon Trust was founded, dedicated to further education and research in Amazonian plant life and conservation.
Margaret Mee's Amazon diaries reflect the great heritage that she has created for the future of natural history. The book starts with a foreword by Prince Philip and by the renowned scientists Sir Ghillean T. Prance and Richard Evans Schultes, as well as by the well-known Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Like the famous journalist Robert MacNeil who wrote the epilogue, they all knew Margaret Mee from various encounters, each was struck by her extraordinary personality and each describes their admiration and fascination for this exceptional person and her art.
In the Introduction her curriculum vitae is briefly outlined, then a series of maps indicate quite precisely the locations of her journeys and study sites. The main focus of the book is the diary written by Margaret Mee herself on her travels between 1956 and 1988. The chapters are laid out in a chronological sequence, where Margaret Mee gives detailed travel descriptions with precise names of persons, places and species. Therefore the text is informative and enriches our knowledge of the Amazon flora by describing the mysterious community of nature and illustrating botanical details with words to supplement the information given by her detailed paintings. As in her pictures, she does not portray the plants as isolated organisms but as part of a vegetational whole, which leads to the appreciation of the interdependence of many of the plants in such an ecologically complex environment. Her diary takes us on her trips through the Amazon and thus the text is an exciting, adventurous journey through Brazil and through the myths of the Amazon forest and botany itself. The botanical reality is shown, mixed to the Amazonian mysticism of the unknown.
The highly readable text is accompanied by many drawings, coloured pictures and original photographs where every picture tells the whole story: the mysterious greenness, the admiration for the beauty of a flower. It is the passion and dedication that surely makes the pictures so fascinating.
In the postscript, her last Amazon expedition is described: the aim of her fifteenth trip to the Amazon was to find the so-called ‘moon flower’ cactus, which opens at night and fades forever at dawn. Since 1965 she had been looking for the flowers in the wild, and finally, in the last months of her life, aged 79, she found Selenicereus wittii in flower and spent the whole night on a boat, drawing and painting every stage of the plant's bloom. The book ends by presenting a useful glossary of indigenous and brazilian names mentioned in the text together with a ‘Botanical History’: 24 pages with 72 small paintings of plants shown earlier in the book accompanied by their botanical descriptions. Flowering epiphytes—bromeliads, orchids and cacti—are presented most commonly. The descriptions are very interesting and answer such questions as where do the plant names originate from, who was the person the plant is named after, what is the meaning of the botanical name, and what is the ecological particularity of this species. In this way, we see more than just a straight list of species, with this chapter presenting interesting details that can be read with pleasure and which give an insight into the history of Amazonian botany and great Amazonian botanists.
All in all, this book is a fascinating supplement to purely scientific books and a delight for anyone who has wandered through Amazonian forests themselves or is simply curious about this botanical wonderland.