A Cattleya violacea, or corsage orchid, pencil and gouache on paper, 1981, by Margaret Mee. Click photo for larger image.

"There was the full moon looking through the branches of the tree -- magnificent -- and all the time, the sound of night birds."

A photograph of a petite 79-year-old woman wearing lipstick and eyeliner, her gray-blond curls contained beneath a woven, brimmed hat, could have been shot at a garden party. In actuality, it was taken in the Amazon during Margaret Mee's 15th, and final, trip to search for and illustrate the plants of the rain forest.

The quote is from an interview with Mee about the culmination of her career, when she was finally able to sketch a rare night-blooming cactus in flower. It aired in 1988 on PBS. The segment, and 30 of Mee's exquisite gouache and pencil watercolors and field sketches, are exhibited in "The Flowering Amazon: Margaret Mee Paintings from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew" at Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University.

The exhibition, originally organized at Kew as a private showing for Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, began a tour of the United States at the New York Botanic Garden last year. The Hunt is the second in a list of distinguished venues that will house it.

Among the most well-known exotics that grow in steamy jungles are orchids and bromeliads, epiphytic plants that perch on branches high in the trees, and Mee captures them beautifully, from showy Cattleya -- the corsage orchid -- and Neoregelia to more diminutive genera.

Mee's most dramatic paintings are intensely worked pages that place a detailed illustration of one plant against the backdrop of its tropical habitat. Vivid, complex, moist, flowing, they are as sensual and lush as the rain forest itself, suggesting its uncanny allure, mystery and potential danger.

Her use of gouache, watercolor made opaque by a filler, allowed for passionately vital color and realistic detail. Mee's great distinction is her combination of an artist's sensibility and a scientist's accuracy.

A Neoregelia margaretae (family Bromeliaceae), pencil and gouache on paper, 199, by Margaret Mee. Click photo for larger image.

She also sketched fauna, including here studies of a lizard, an iguana and a deadly coral snake.

Mee (1909-1988) was born in England, where she was trained in art. In 1952, she moved to Brazil to aid her ailing sister, and Mee and her husband established a home in Sao Paulo, where she taught art. Seduced by their beauty, she began to paint local plants, and in 1956, when she was 46, she made her first trip into the Amazon.

Mee thus joined a lineage of global adventurers that stretches back at least to the Victorian women who made journal entries while trudging through inhospitable terrain in ground-length dresses, and continues through famed contemporary explorers and observers such as Jane Goodall.

The cactus referred to above was a Selenicerus wittii, commonly called "Moonflower," which Mee first encountered in 1964, during her third Amazon journey, in the igapo, or flooded forest. She came across the plant occasionally in succeeding years, but never with flowers, which bloom for a single night and then die. In May 1988, the month of her 79th birthday, Mee stayed through the night beside a cerus, watching its buds open into sweet-scented blooms and sketching it by torchlight from her boat deck. Displayed are several paintings and a field sketch of this wondrous vision of semi-cupped crimson and yellow-green leaves, overlapping up the trunk of a tree, its white multipetaled flowers reaching into the moist night from the tips of long stems.

The expeditions weren't without hardship. Mee, for example, contracted malaria and hepatitis, nearly drowned on several occasions, suffered broken ribs in an accident, and encountered hostile Indians and threatening gold prospectors. She packed a .32 revolver along with her paints and brushes (the latter two exhibited).

Mee was also an outspoken advocate of rain forest conservation and the rights of Amerindians. The Audubon Society named her as one of the Top 100 20th century conservationists.

In the 1980s, realizing that her paintings represented a habitat that was in danger of extinction, she and supporters raised funds to purchase 60 of them for Kew rather than place them on the commercial market. Soon after the opening of her Amazon Exhibition at Kew, Mee was killed in an automobile accident in England, far removed from the extraordinary realm, presumed latent with instruments of demise, that she thrived in.

Baskets and blowpipes

Complementing the paintings are fascinating artifacts from Kew's Economic Botany Collections, several gathered by renowned British explorer and plant collector Richard Spruce, who first entered the Amazon in 1849, and who was an inspiration to Mee.

Among them are a paddle and a drum made from tree trunks; gourds that held water and curare, the poison from Strychnos bark used on darts and arrows; and a Yanomami basket, arrowhead case and feather headdress.

The catalog, with essays about Mee, her comments and full-color illustrations of her paintings, is a handsome tribute to her life and spirit ($25, paper). Oppenheimer Editions, Chicago, has produced a limited print edition of 25 of Mee's paintings, which may be viewed at www.oppenheimereditions.com.

"Amazon" continues through July 31 on the 5th floor of the Hunt Library. Admission is free. Hours are 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday. For information, call 412-268-2434 or visit http://huntbot.andrew.cmu.edu.