Jewels of the Desert: Francis Masson’s Starfish and Birds of Paradise
FOR BRITAIN’S FIRST OFFICIAL roving plant collector, Francis Masson, it was the bizarre plants of the southern African deserts that transformed his vision. Masson was born in Aberdeen in 1741 and brought up to work as a gardener, and like many other Scots of his time decided to seek his fortune down south. He got a job as an under gardener at Kew, where his enthusiasm for botany soon caught the eye of his employers, and in particular the director, Joseph Banks, the Svengali of eighteenth-century botany. Ever since his tantalising first visit to the Cape of Good Hope, Banks had wanted to send an envoy to southern Africa, to gather seeds and specimens for Kew. An artisan who knew his place fitted the bill perfectly. Banks was later to describe Masson as ‘a young gardener who has no education beyond his line of life’, so that there would be no challenging the agenda or morals of the management. Perhaps neither man knew at that point that Masson had a natural talent for flower painting, and that – male, European but no lackey of the system – he had a latent sympathy for the cultures and ecosystems he was about to visit.
Masson set out on his exploration from Cape Town in December 1772, and over the next two years kept a methodical journal. He records the crops grown by the Dutch farmers, the local hunting customs and the wild animals of the plains. He saw lions, elephants and zebras. He laments the demise of the hippopotamus, once abundant in all the large rivers but almost exterminated since the arrival of Dutch settlers. Like most early colonial explorers, he first needed to see the landscape through a European lens to make sense of it in his imagination. But reflecting on the fortunes of a country whose invaders had largely treated its natural wealth with imperious negligence, his conclusions didn’t follow the usual colonial line:
This tract of country has afforded more riches for the naturalist than perhaps any other part of the globe. When the Europeans first settled there, the whole might have been compared to a great park, furnished with a wonderful variety of animals … but since the country has been inhabited by Europeans, most of these have been destroyed or driven away.
At least the flora seemed unspent and unexpected. Masson found species which were to become favourites in European gardens: ixias, gladioli and irises in the valley grasslands, proteas on the skirts of the mountains, heathers on the crags. Yet it was the dry and seemingly barren sands of the western coast, known as the Karoo, which captivated him. This is in southern Africa’s equivalent of the ‘Mediterranean biome’, and he found the climate hot and ‘dismal’. He was fascinated by the range of succulent plants – ‘endowed by nature, as the camel is, with the power of retaining water’ – that were able to flourish in this inhospitable wasteland. He records his arrival in the Karoo on 20 November 1773:
At night we got clear of the mountains, but entered a rugged country, which the new inhabitants name Canaan’s Land; though it might be called the Land of Sorrow; for no land could exhibit a more wasteful prospect; the plains consisting of nothing but rotten rock, intermixed with a little red loam in the interstices, which supported a variety of scrubby bushes, in their nature evergreen but, by the scorching heat of the sun, stripped almost of all their leaves. Yet notwithstanding the disagreeable aspect of this tract, we enriched our collection by a variety of succulent plants, which we had never seen before, and which appeared to us like a new creation.
Amongst these were the strange and almost unknown stapelias which were to form the subject of his best paintings. Stapelias look like cacti, but are related to subtropical vines (and to the American milkweed, host plant of the monarch butterfly). They have fleshy, toothed, photosynthesising stems, whose high water content is an adaptation to living in desert conditions. Their five-petalled flowers, sharp cut and symmetrical, have been called ‘starfish flowers’. They’re covered in fine hairs and can be as ornamented as embroidered fabrics. S. ocellata’s have the fine speckle of a wildcat’s skin; S. reticulata’s are like Fabergé eggs, or sea urchins – red domes inside calyces patched with orange; S. revoluta’s are fully reflexed, and have the look of tiny velveteen jellyfish pulsing from the stem. (Masson doesn’t mention that the starfish blooms stink incongruously of dead meat, to attract pollinating carrion flies.)
What is remarkable is how this inexperienced artist, on his first trip overseas, and nurtured by the contrived and prettified plant portraits of Pierre Redouté and Georg Ehret, is able to capture the weirdness of this new flora, and to convey visually something essential about how it functioned in a profoundly hostile environment. The succulence of the stapelias, which helps them hold stores of water in drought conditions, is one of the strategies that marine plants – like the samphire family – employ to survive the freshwater-sapping effect of the sea. Masson intuits this, sensing the convergence of plant form in the two habitats. A browse through his stapelia paintings is a submarine experience, a journey through a terrestrial reef. He paints the stems heavily, using shadow to give an almost impasto effect which emphasises their fleshiness. Some are as stiff and glaucous as coral, some possess the languidness of oarweed. The flowers have the look of exotic sea creatures, clinging precariously to the wavy stems, and he paints their hairs – also a water-conserving adaptation – individually. All that is missing from his pictures is a sense of the plants in their habitat – a type of botanical painting that wouldn’t really begin for another half-century. If he had included this, we would see one other strategy for moisture conservation. Despite being supremely adapted physically to surviving in fierce dry heat, stapelias opt to grow, whenever it is possible, nestled in the cooling shade of desert shrubs.
Masson’s upbringing may have helped him empathise with these organisms which so radically contradicted the European conviction that rich plant growth depended on fertile soil. He would have been familiar with one kind of wasteland vegetation from the hills round his Aberdeenshire home. But by the side of the spangled tuftings of the Karoo, his home moors must have seemed like a monoculture. In his youth he would have been aware of the depauperisation of Scotland’s upland flora as a result of the Highland Clearances. Even as far south as Aberdeenshire subsistence farming was being replaced by sheep herding on a vast scale. Masson recognised that an almost identical process was beginning to affect the Karoo.
The local tribespeople, the Khoikhoi (then called Hottentots by Europeans), were nomadic herders, grazing their Nguni cattle on common ranges and practising a variation of transhumance in which they and their stock migrated to more richly vegetated areas as and when rainfall or the seasons dictated. The growth of the stapelias and other desert natives (most of which are perennial and can withstand grazing) is highly dependent on rainfall, so this system made for a sustainable balance between plants and animals, with the nomadic graziers taking seasonal and sometimes opportunistic advantage of local conditions.
When the Dutch settlers arrived they adopted the Khoikhoi’s herding strategies for a while. But when Masson was there in the late eighteenth century, they were beginning to create fixed, private grazing areas of the kind that characterised north European stock-raising farms, and which were quite unsuited to arid habitats. Settlement around private water sources meant that the grazing orbits shrank dramatically and became more intensively used. Livestock was moved from rangeland to water source to kraal on a daily basis, partly to provide some protection from predators. The concentrated movement of animals created erosion, and the fixed kraals soon became barren areas of windblown sand.
Masson travelled through similar terrain the following September, and a conversation with a ‘peasant’ (presumably a Dutch farmer) hints at the intensity of the grazing:
26 October 1774. The sterile appearance of this country exceeds all imagination: wherever one casts his eye he sees nothing but naked hills without a blade of grass, only small succulent plants … The peasant told us, that in winter the hills were painted with all kinds of colours; and said, it grieved him often, that no person of knowledge in botany had ever had an opportunity of seeing his country in the flowery season. We expressed great surprise at seeing such large flocks of sheep as he was possessed of subsist in such a desart; on which he observed, that their sheep never ate grass, only succulent plants, and all sorts of shrubs, many of which were aromatic …
[31 October] This desart is extensive and … [t]here still remains a great treasure of new plants in this country, especially of the succulent kind, which cannot be preserved but by having good figures and descriptions of them made on the spot; which might be easily accomplished in the rainy season, when there is plenty of fresh water every where. But at this season of the year, we were obliged to make the greatest expeditions to save the lives of our cattle, only collecting what we found growing along the road side, which amounted to above a hundred plants, never before described.
It was typical of Masson’s personality to put animal welfare above professional ambition.
Masson drew a few wild specimens on his field trips, but most of his work is based on plants he had transplanted to his garden in Cape Town, where he’d settled in 1786. ‘The figures’, he wrote, ‘were drawn in their native climate, and … they possibly exhibit the natural appearance of the plants they represent, better than figures made from subjects growing in exotic houses can do.’ Masson was being typically modest. His collection of paintings, published as Stapelia Novae in 1796–7, catch the exhilaration and optimism he felt at this blooming of the desert.
The Karoo’s own future was to be of the kind familiar in so-called wastelands. The fighting of the Boer War raged across it at the dawn of the twentieth century, and in the early years of the twenty-first it was announced as a major site for the establishment of fracking in southern Africa.
Masson himself, for all his sympathy with the indigenous people and animals and plants of the Karoo, was not entirely immune to imperial sentiment. On a trip back to Britain in 1773 he brought with him the first specimen of the bird of paradise flower, one of five species of Strelitzia which grow on river banks and in damp scrub in Cape Province. No flower as lavishly coloured or extravagantly shaped had been seen in England before. It is over six feet tall, and the flowers stand high above the leaves on the tips of the long stalks like exotic cranes. The hard, pointed sheaths, washed with pastel pinks and mauves, are held at right angles to the stem, in the manner of a bird’s head and beak. From this sheath the flowers emerge laboriously, each one taking a week to unfurl. They comprise three flamboyant orange sepals and three diminutive blue petals, together giving the appearance of an ornamental crest. The flowers imperious, almost heraldic form, led to its dubbing as Strelitzia reginae, in honour of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen consort of the United Kingdom, and painters from Kew and the Court circle set themselves the task of loyally capturing its image on paper. The Austrian botanical artist Franz Bauer devoted an entire volume to it (Strelitzia depicta, 1818). He caught well enough the sunset blues and oranges of the flowers, but their plastic sheerness, echoed more strongly in the surface texture of the sheath, proved beyond his skills. As it did for Masson, for all his later ability to evoke novel plant forms.
One other notable feature of the floral bird of paradise, undrawn and unremarked by Masson, is that it is a magnet for real birds. Sunbirds come to sip nectar from the plant, perching on its flowers to gain access to the honeyed inner chambers. Their weight causes the petals to open and cover their feet with pollen, so enlisting the birds as pollinators in exchange for their nectarous harvest. As we’ve seen, the mechanisms of plant pollination by insects were just being unravelled during these first decades of the nineteenth century. The idea that exquisite birds might also be functionaries, as well as diners on honey, was too radical by far.