On August 16, 1909, Margaret Mee was born in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. She trained as a commercial artist, married a graphic designer, and moved to Brazil in 1952. She spent the next four decades making botanical expeditions into the Amazon — seventeen major trips in total, most of them alone or with hired river pilots into regions that experienced botanists described as impenetrable.

She painted plants. Specifically, she painted orchids, bromeliads, and other species that died before they could be transported to European herbaria — and so existed in the scientific record as pressed fragments, colorless, dimensionless, their living appearance unrecorded. Mee recorded them. Her field journals documented habitat, associated species, and distribution with the precision of trained fieldwork. Her watercolors captured morphological detail that photographs of the era could not.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew classified her as a botanical artist. The Natural History Museum collected her work. The scientific community that used her records to describe species cited her as a source but not as a co-discoverer. Several species carry her name — Neoregelia margaretae, Aechmea meeana — applied after the fact by scientists who had used her illustrations as primary documentation.

She drove off a road in the state of Minas Gerais in November 1988 and died from her injuries. She had just completed the most remarkable painting of her career: Strophocactus wittii in full nocturnal bloom, a flower she had pursued for fifteen years. She finally found it blooming at three in the morning on the Rio Negro and painted it by torchlight.

The painting is in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens. The cactus flowers for one night a year.