Margaret Mee

• Name — Margaret Ursula Mee • Born — 22 May 1909 Chesham, Buckinghamshire • Died — 28 November 1988 Leicester • Education — St Martin's School of Art Camberwell School of Art • Awards — 1976 MBE for services to Brazilian botany 1979 Brazilian Order of Cruzeiro do Sul 1986 Fellowship of the Linnean Society

Margaret Ursula Brown was born in Whitehill, Chesham, in 1909. She attended Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham, followed by The School of Art, Science and Commerce, Watford. After a short period of teaching in Liverpool she decided to travel abroad. While in Berlin in 1933, Brown witnessed the burning of the Reichstag and subsequent Jewish boycott, which confirmed her left-wing views. During the Second World War she worked in Hatfield as a draughtswoman at the de Havilland aircraft factory.

Mee married Reginald Bruce Bartlett in January 1936. Like her husband, she became a committed trade union activist for the Union of Sign, Glass and Ticket Writers and joined the Communist Party. Mee addressed the TUC in 1937, proposing the raising of the school-leaving age and was subsequently offered, but declined, a job with Ernest Bevin. The marriage to Bartlett was not happy and, after a long separation, ended in divorce in 1943. She married Greville Mee, her second husband, in 1980. After the war Mee studied art at St Martin's School of Art in London. In 1950 she attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where she learnt her style of illustration, and received a national diploma in painting and design in 1950. She moved to Brazil in 1952 to teach art in the British school of São Paulo, where Greville Mee later joined her. Her first expedition was in 1956 to Belém in the Amazon Basin. She then became a botanical artist for São Paulo's Instituto de Botanica in 1958, exploring the rainforest and more specifically Amazonas state from 1964, painting the plants she saw, some new to science, as well as collecting some for later illustration. She created 400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks, and 15 diaries. Mee travelled to Washington D. C., USA, in 1964 and briefly to England in 1968 for the exhibition and publication of her book, Flowers of the Brazilian Forests. She gave a lecture in Washington D. C., USA in 1967. She returned to Brazil and joined protests to draw international attention to the deforestation of the Amazon region. Mee travelled to London in 1988 for the publication of her book In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests. She gave a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society and travelled to the US to publicize the book, where she was interviewed on the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour programme, an interview which was repeated two days later following her death.

Mee died following a car crash in Seagrave, Leicestershire, on 30 November 1988. She was 79. In January 1989 a memorial to her life, botanical work and environmental campaigning took place in Kew Gardens.

Margaret Mee is recorded as botanical illustrator, painter, trade unionist and botanical collector.