sexta-feira, 5 de março de 2010

The Poetry of Botany

Travelling without a gun and a box of watercolors

If you travelling to Brasil, stop by Belo Horizonte and visit the Margaret Mee (1909/1988) botanical illustration exhibit at the Palacio das Artes – a celebration of 100 years of her life and work.

Born in England, she came to Brasil in her fifties and in her sixties and seventies she was travelling alone to the Amazon to find, document and paint Brazilian flowers. In a marriage of poetry to science, she made important contributions to the understanding of Brazilian tropical botany and to the need for conservation of what we may only see in watercolor wash.


















The exhibit spans three elegant halls on the first floor of the Palacio das Artes, a modern building nested inside the Municipal Gardens (Parque Municipal) planned by Burle Marx - bromeliads and orchids in bloom inside and out.

One of her book is for sale at the Palácio’s bookstore and already on my shelf. Tomorrow I go to enjoy my third visit.

About the flowers, she said once:
“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.”

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