Women Who Shaped Garden History
Margaret Mee spent over three decades documenting the flora of the Brazilian Amazon through exquisite botanical illustrations. Her work became a powerful tool for conservation, drawing international attention to the destruction of the rainforest.
Mee was born in Buckinghamshire, England, and trained at the Camberwell School of Art. She moved to Brazil in 1952 and soon became fascinated by the flora of the Amazon. Between 1956 and 1988, she made 15 expeditions into the rainforest, traveling by canoe and on foot through remote areas to find and paint rare plants, many of which had never been illustrated before.
Mee's paintings combined scientific accuracy with extraordinary beauty. She painted plants life-size, in their natural settings, capturing the colors and forms of living specimens with remarkable fidelity. She witnessed the accelerating destruction of the Amazon firsthand and became an outspoken advocate for conservation, using her art to draw public attention to the crisis. Her final expedition, in 1988, fulfilled a 20-year quest to paint the Selenicereus wittii, a night-blooming cactus of the flooded forest. She died in a car accident in England later that year.