The Butterfly Effect: The Moonflower
IN 1972 THE ENGLISH ARTIST Margaret Mee had been living in Brazil for the greater part of fifteen years. For a scientifically untrained woman from another continent she had made a powerful impact on Brazilian culture. Her exhibitions of paintings of plants from deep Amazonia had caused a sensation. She had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and had two of her newly discovered species named in her honour. By the end of the 1960s she was one of a small group of scientists and radicals speaking out against the attrition of the forest by mineral companies and loggers and government-sponsored road schemes. Not long after recovering from a long and debilitating bout of infectious hepatitis in 1968 Margaret made a private commitment. She had been an activist in her youth and resolved that in future her explorations and paintings would have a political as well as a botanical purpose: they would become a statement about Amazonia’s irreplaceable vegetal energy.
Early in 1972, exploring the river Negro, she painted for the first time a plant that was to become a grail for her, and a symbol of what was happening to the forest. She’d glimpsed the vanishingly rare and legend bound moonflower, Selenicereus wittii, five years before, but it had been a poor specimen, budless and bloomless. The plant she found in 1972 also lacked flowers, but was growing in an igapó, a patch of flooded forest dizzy with blue orchids, and it gave her new insights into the pattern of tropical plant growth. Even by the standards of Amazonia’s flora the plant she saw, and then pictured, was phantasmagoric: a spill of leaves (in fact flattened stems) sea green and cochineal red, edged with spines and ‘pressed as flat as a scarlet transfer against [a] trunk’. Selenicereus wittii is a cactus which climbs trees, and Mee figured it like a suit of medieval armour, with a laterally protruding leaf like the beak of a helmet and two more seeming to be laced up round the tree by their interlocking spines. A plant girded against tough times. The lack of flowers was a disappointment, but Margaret knew enough of the scanty information that had been collected about them – that they opened on just one night in the year, were ambrosially scented, and about as different from the palisade of thorny leaves as a kissing gate from a stonewall. It set her on a quest that was to last the rest of her life.
Margaret next saw Selenicereus in September 1977, again on the Negro. The igapó was dry at this season, and ‘after hard walking through dry, tangled wood I found one plant’. She and her boat crew discovered a few more, but most were dying. The surrounding landscape that she’d loved and explored for over twenty years was unrecognisable. The forest on both banks had been burnt off as far as the horizon, and any obstinate relics and regrowth sprayed with chemical defoliants: ‘There was not a spot of green to be seen,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘The trees were sick with bark peeling and rolling off the trunks’ – a visual metaphor of unravelling that appears in several of her pictures. What was left was pocked by open-cast bauxite mining and gouged open for new roads to service the palm-oil farmers and gold diggers. But at last she found a single moonflower in fruit, studded with brown orbs held close to the stems, and resonant enough to inspire a full-scale portrait. Her finished picture, dated February 1978, is dramatically different from the cameo of five years before. It has an air of portentousness, with the livid cactus climbing the foreground like an extending periscope. Behind it is a sepulchral forest of ghost trees, almost leafless, the bleached white of the dead trunks brightened only by the vivid ‘transfers’ of more moon-flower leaves.
By now, she knew something about the moonflower’s life cycle, but the scraps of evidence were not much better than tantalising rumour. The fruits form when the winter floodwaters have risen to just below the flowers, suggesting they might be eaten – and the seeds inside dispersed – by fish. Margaret still did not know what colour the flowers were; she presumed red, like the dominant colour in the leaves. No one knew what its pollinators were, but bats or hawkmoths seemed likely candidates. Margaret’s hope to be the first person to paint this prodigal in the wild was now motivated by more than rarity hunting. The moonflower, in its elusiveness and mysterious entanglements, was emerging for her as a symbol of the complex fragility of the Amazonian ecosystem, whose destruction she was witnessing first hand.
Margaret Mee was born in the Chilterns in southern England in 1909, and moved permanently to Brazil in 1952. Her journey from benign European hill country to torrid wetland, a transformative landscape change, may go some way to explaining the piercing, almost extraterrestrial originality of her Amazonian paintings. But she took other legacies with her on the journey to São Paulo, which added edges of steeliness and ecological insight to her pictures. In the 1930s, busking in London as a freelance painter after dropping out of Watford School of Art, she became a political activist, joining anti-fascist rallies (in Germany as well as England) and addressing the 1937 Congress of the TUC on the raising of the school-leaving age. During the war she worked in the drawing office at the de Havilland aircraft factory, north of London, and learned to live with the constant threat of flying bombs – an education in doggedness that would serve her well in the troubled environments of modern Amazonia. Most crucially for her painting, she was accepted as a full-time student at Camberwell School of Art after the war, aged thirty-seven, and began to study under Victor Pasmore, co-founder of the realist Euston Road Group. She recalls his insistent maxim: ‘Look at the shapes – fit the shapes between the spaces …’ Perhaps neither of them realised then that this was a fundamental rule of ecology as well as composition: ‘shapes’ (and organisms) have to ‘fit’ and adapt to the ‘spaces’ or niches they inhabit. Margaret’s large-scale Amazon painting would become full of cavernous spaces, pregnant with opportunities for life.
Her move to Brazil was almost accidental, initiated by a visit in 1952 to her sister, Catherine, who lived in São Paulo. She fell in love with the country and shortly afterwards her husband, Greville, sold their house in Blackheath and joined her. Margaret began teaching art in the British School at São Paulo, and Greville, a commercial artist with airbrushing skills, found plenty of work in the city’s expanding business network. To escape the crowds and heat they frequently hiked in nearby forests and open spaces on the edge of the city. It was on a suburban tramp by an old tramway line that Margaret saw a castor oil plant, with, to her eyes, very curious leaves and fruits: ‘It had such wonderful shapes,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘I sketched it immediately.’ From then on, in Greville’s words, ‘Margaret put aside all other ideas and began sketching and painting flowers.’
It is just possible that during these learning years Margaret had seen the painting of a moonflower in Robert Thornton’s famously grandiose book Temple of Flora (1804–11). This immense and extravagant folly, which bankrupted Thornton, included a picture of a related species Selenicereus grandiflorus, which had been introduced to Britain from Jamaica about 1700. The portrait, with its mixture of Gothic, Romantic and oriental flourishes, catches the feverish mood of early nineteenth-century plant worship, and shows just how much plant painting would develop over the next two centuries. It is the work of two artists. The cactus flower itself, looking as if it has been dipped in honey and dominating the foreground, is by the landscape painter Philip Reinagle. Thornton delegated the background to another smalltime artist, Abraham Pether, and it includes an incongruous English woodland, an ivy-clad tower with a clock face showing midnight (‘the hour at night when this flower is at full expanse’ in Thornton’s directorial notes) and a rising full moon behind the trees in the top right-hand corner. The moon, at least, was to make a second appearance in the art of Selenicereus.
In May 1988 Margaret returned to Amazonia after a spell in England recuperating from a hip replacement. She was close to her seventy-ninth birthday, but set off by boat from Manaus straight away. Outside the city the forest alongside the river Negro had now almost vanished, devastated by charcoal burners whose plastic-roofed huts were sprouting on land where trees had once grown. It was six hours before they began to see mature forest again on the banks. Margaret had two assistants with her, Sue Loram and Sally Westminster, plus film-maker Tony Morrison and his assistant. They were heading for the igapó in which Margaret had last seen a Selenicereus, its blooms finished, six years previously. This time the expedition was single-mindedly directed towards recording its flowering.
Margaret’s photo album hints at the excitement she was feeling, camped down in familiar territory on what would be her final trip to Amazonia. She is thin but vivacious, dressed in a sensible bush shirt with her waist-length hair done up in a bun. In pictures aboard her boat she has a mannerism which seems oddly characteristic. When she is touching or pointing to a plant, her other hand is always touching or holding on to her favourite straw hat, as if she is using it as an anchor, or lucky charm. Throughout her thirty years in Amazonia she retained an essential and sometimes old-fashioned Englishness. Her journals and photos suggest she got on easily and naturally with the local Indians, especially their children (she had none of her own). They bring her plants, sit in on her painting sessions, try to cut off bits of her thick mane of auburn hair. Margaret, for her part, mucks in with the housework and passes on her European perspective on plants. But unlike many other modern European explorers she doesn’t attempt to enter or translate her hosts’ complex cosmology, and their view of the forest as a spirit realm. This never seems like a hangover of imperial hauteur or narrow-mindedness, more an honest attempt to keep some clarity of vision inside the cultural language she understood.
Her physical trials in the forest are harrowing. She contracts hepatitis and malaria, and is repeatedly disabled by insect bites (insects, as many painters in the tropics have discovered, also love to eat the paint straight from canvases). She is robbed, swindled, threatened with assault by drunken migrant workers. In the face of this she adopts the unflappable obstinacy of an Englishwoman who has lived through the war. She dispels male predators with mockery, backed up by a small revolver. She sabotages the wildlife shooting sprees of visitors from the towns by literally rocking their boats. She wears pyjamas in her hammock. Holding on to her English hat seems to me to have helped ground her paintings. Although she had an extraordinary, empathetic awareness of the living complexity of the forest, she reveals this through the interplay of space and light, universals of visual language for all species, and never by a descent into mystical imagery.
For the next couple of days Margaret and her team explore the creeks around their base. They find a few moonflowers, but as usual their blooms are over, or the buds blown off the tree. At last they find a spray with two buds au point. ‘Surely,’ Margaret writes, ‘it [has] to be the night.’ It is an evening of thin cloud, and the low sun is shimmering on the river, turning the forest an aqueous yellow-green. Within an hour the sky is black and only the brightest stars are visible. Margaret and her companions take it in turns to keep watch on the buds, using brief flashes from a torch so as ‘not to disturb the opening’. Once, in the confusion of the dark, a torch slips overboard, and they watch its beam slowly dimming as it falls through ‘the deep, tea-coloured water’. For two hours the bud doesn’t change, just marks time. Then, quite rapidly, the first petal begins to unfurl, and then others, until the whole flower has sprung to animated life. Margaret moves her sketching gear to the roof of the boat, and Sue stands beside her with a pair of battery lights. Tony’s camera floodlights are much brighter and Margaret, with no idea of what is supposed to happen next, begins to worry that they are slowing the flower’s opening. She asks for them to be turned down to the lowest practicable glimmer, and continues to sketch by light of the full moon which has providentially begun to rise over the dark rim of the forest. Within an hour the pure white bloom, frilled and starry and nearly twelve inches from stalk to petal tip is fully open. The petals are like thin swan’s feathers. Everyone is transfixed by its spectral beauty and ‘extraordinary, sweet perfume’. But Margaret is still anxious, this time about the absence of pollinators. Her early worries that the lights might interfere with the flowering now grow into a concern that the presence of several busy humans may have similarly disturbed the insects, and that they have ‘upset a delicate balance between plant and animal which had taken millions of years to evolve’. She has an image – an epiphany, almost – of such intrusions ‘multiplied across all species in the length and breadth of Amazonia’, and finds it hard to contemplate. In her mind, it is a real-world corollary of that ecological metaphor about interconnectedness – the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil setting off a storm in Europe. Here, the European intrusion might be stopping the insects’ pollination flights. She finishes the sketches, and the absence of pollinators becomes one of their potent spaces. Later, in Rio de Janeiro, she turns them into one of the great masterpieces of botanical art, a haunting portrait of the dusky intricacy of the rainforest, an interior knitted from dark spaces and labyrinthine verticals, and lit as much by the four flowers in the foreground as the haze of moonlight behind the trees. Two arm-like flower stalks reach out from the top of the cactus, seeming to support the moon, a vast luminescent disc located in the top right of the painting, just as it is in The Temple of Flora’s Gothic illustration.
There were to be some postscripts. A couple of days after the sketches were made it was Margaret’s seventy-ninth birthday, and she celebrated the twin achievements with a small party by the side of the Rio Negro. In a snapshot she has exchanged her bush shirt for a chic evening dress with puffed sleeves, and she and Sue sit smiling against the sunset with a bottle of champagne and a cake made of the Amazon fruit cupuaçu. Six months later this woman who had survived fifteen voyages deep into one of the most dangerous environments on earth was killed in a road traffic accident in rural Leicestershire.
Four years after Margaret Mee’s vigil on the river Negro, I watched a moonflower open myself – only it was a different, commoner species, and I was at a smart party in Bath, not in an Amazonian igapó, adrift amongst the ghost trees. Our host was an enterprising plantswoman who’d found a ‘Night-flowering Cereus’ for sale in a garden centre. The description on the label was expansive in praise of its scent, and hinted that the night of flowering was predictable from the swelling of the buds. So she thought a celebration – a floral Opening Night – might be on the cards. Potential revellers were put on twelve-hour telephone alert.
We were duly summoned one evening around cocktail hour, and a few drinks later the buds started to unravel, like inexpressibly slow gasps. Their aroma was extraordinary but disorientating. It wasn’t floral at all, but like fruit – luscious, ripe, deliquescing fruit – and resolved itself for me somewhere between pineapple and very heavy melon. In an unintended echo of Margaret Mee’s last evening on the Rio Negro we toasted the blooms with an artfully fragrant champagne.
I still have a photograph of the cactus, fully open, taken later that evening. There are six pure white, multi-petalled blooms sprouting from a tumbling, broad-leaved vine, which is set in a terracotta pot, on a newly ironed Provençal cloth, on a wicker table. Twenty-three years on I can identify it as probably a commercial hybrid of Selenicereus greggii, a related species from south-western states of North America, where it’s known and admired as ‘the Queen of the Night’. I doubt we could have imagined that a moonflower drinks party – which felt so chic, so modern – had been a commonplace of south-western American life in late Victorian times, when folks used to drink sarsaparilla on their porches as the Queen drowsed out her scent under the desert stars. In fact I doubt if any of us who were present – certainly not me – had given much thought to the plant itself, what sort of creature it was, why it should flower in such an extravagance of scent on just a single night in the year. It was, that evening in an English conservatory, just a piece of especially diverting interior decor.
In this I guess our little company, who would all have classed themselves as plant lovers, were in tune with the twentieth century’s floral zeitgeist, and Margaret Mee, with her intense vision of the moonflower as a symbol of connectivity, an organism with a life to lead beyond her needs and human perspective, who was the visionary. It was as if she were an intruder from some alien community in which the plants themselves dictated botanical etiquette. But in the mid 1990s, her notes and drawings and specimens proved to be a vital foundation for the first full scientific paper on S. wittii, published by a quartet of German botanists. Almost nothing was known about the plant prior to Mee’s explorations, and herbarium specimens were rare and sterile. The German team started work with a collection of clones cultivated in several botanic gardens and one wild specimen from Manaus, where Margaret had painted the plant in the wild. They had also been sent a fresh ripe fruit by her just before her death, plus the crucial information that the plant came into flower at the period when the floodwaters were highest. From these fragments of evidence, and analysis of the fragrance by gas chromatography, they pieced together a biography of what they call, with some understatement, a ‘paradoxical life form’.
S. wittii is a true epiphyte, its roots emerging from the flattened leaf-like stems and attaching themselves to trees. They have no connection with the ground. The stems photosynthesise by what is called crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM), not uncommon in epiphytes in hot climates. CAM reverses the usual daily cycle of gas exchange. The pores (stomata) on the leaves or stems, through which gases and water vapour move, open widest at night when temperatures are lowest, to harvest carbon dioxide with the minimum loss of water by transpiration. During the heat of the day the stomata close, lowering water loss but allowing the emission of large quantities of carbon dioxide.
The flowers open for one night only in May, normally at the full moon. The pure white petals reflect the ultraviolet rays in moonlight, making them especially visible to night-flying insects. The heavy scent is also channelled at moths. It has been identified as a mixture chiefly of benzyl alcohol, benzyl benzoate and benzyl salicylate, compounds which, to give a rough idea of where in the scent spectrum the moonflower lies, also occur in jasmine, tuberose, ylang-ylang, hyacinth and balsam. They are typical of what is called the ‘white-floral-image’, a pattern of sense stimuli to attract night-flying moths. The act of pollination has never been seen, nor the pollinators positively identified, but from the extreme length of the flower and nectar tube (ten inches) they could only be successfully probed by two species of local hawkmoths with tongues of similar length, Cocytius cruentus and Amphimoena walkeri. These are the south American analogues of the Madagascan hawkmoth Darwin correctly prophesied must exist to pollinate the Madagascan Star of Bethlehem orchids.
The fruits, which ripen after one year, are unusually structured, the seeds being surrounded by large air-filled flotation chambers, so that when they fall into the floodwater, the seeds bob off like corks. Some float away on the current until they are snagged by a host tree trunk; others are eaten by fish, which excrete the seeds, to occasionally end up at the same destinations. They germinate in contact with the trunk, and the cactus can then climb up to six feet or more. But in especially high seasonal floods much of the plant may be underwater, which suggests why the stems have evolved as flat, thick-skinned pads, which wrap themselves tightly round the trunk like a wet suit. When Tony Morrison visited the plant Margaret had painted the following year (1989) he found it entirely submerged by water.
What Margaret had intuited has now been proved. Selenicereus is indeed an indicator of forest fragility, a lens on its complexity. It knits together not just the forest’s organisms, but its fundamental elements – air, water, seasonality. Moth food becomes fruit becomes raft becomes fish becomes tree climber.