Dispatch from the roof of the world January 4, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Lecture Dianne Aigaki Wed, Jan 9, 5:30pm Sala Quetzal Biblioteca Pública Insurgentes 25 50 pesos

Dianne Aigaki, a botanical artist visiting San Miguel for the winter, has lived in Dharamsala, India at the foot of the Himalayas since 1996, working as a volunteer consultant for the Tibetan Exile Government. She moved there to be part of a community, “...where people aspired to be like the leader; where the leader is a person of impeccable moral credentials. I wanted to live in a society where parents tell their children to grow up to be like the head of the country, in this case, the Dalai Lama.”

Besides training people worldwide to write funding proposals and project management plans, Aigaki has been an artist for 35 years, working in acrylics, watercolor, stained glass, print making, and cyanotypes, a technique used in the 1700s to document rare plants. Her specialty in botanical illustration is wildflowers growing in Tibet at 11,000–18,000 feet altitude. She spends eight weeks each summer in eastern Tibet, documenting flora of the mountains and high grasslands and leading botanical illustration/photography tours. Her paintings are exhibited worldwide and she speaks at museums, universities and botanic gardens on “Botanical Art as a Vehicle for Cultural Diplomacy, Botanical Illustration Field Work in Tibet” and “Women Explorers.”

Why go all the way to Tibet to paint wildflowers? The Tibetan Plateau enjoys one of the most diverse and richest collections of flora in the world. From late May until September, wildflowers carpet the hills, meadows and mountainsides: a river of purple, white, blue, orange, magenta and every color in between. Many of these plants are rare and endangered or have been used for centuries in traditional medicines to treat illnesses such as asthma, arthritis, cancer, blood pressure, parasites and a plethora of other diseases and illnesses. It is a wonderland for the botanist, ethnobotanist, botanical illustrator, outdoor enthusiast and photographer alike.

Aigaki’s flora documentation project is part of a cultural diplomacy exchange where Aigaki takes letters, gifts, cassette tapes and paintings of wildflowers back and forth between families in Tibet and the Tibetan refugee community in India. The project keeps alive the discussion on Tibet as an independent country under siege. It brings new information and focus to how global warming is affecting the Tibetan Plateau and how Tibetan nomads and villagers are faring fifty years after the Chinese occupation of their homeland.

Why botanical illustration in an era when everyone has access to digital photography? From the Renaissance to the New Millennium, botanical illustration has remained one of the principal methods by which plants have been taxonomized, anatomized, and published in scientific references. Botanical illustrators are still called on to produce scientific renderings and naturalist field guides today. Botanists state that nothing compares to the human touch of the botanical illustrator to achieve the utmost accuracy of the plant rendering.

Because of the difficulty of transporting live specimens, early explorers took artists with them to document plants and animals in their native environment. Captain Cook traveled with a botanist and five artists during his round-the-world voyages in the late 1700s. There are countless adventure stories of men and women who traveled to every continent drawing and painting the rare and fragile plants they found. Thousands of these species are presently known only through those illustrations which have been preserved in museums, botanical societies and private collections all over the world.

In San Miguel de Allende, Aigaki will teach a class “Explorers at the El Charco del Ingenio” at the El Charco del Ingenio, giving participants a chance to hone their botanical illustration skills as if they were explorers in the 1500s and documenting the flora for the first time, sending their paintings back to Europeans who hunger for information about the New World.

Aigaki is a member of WINGS WorldQuest (supporting women explorers worldwide). In 2007, she carried the WINGS flag into Tibet. She is also a member of the Society of Women Geographers, the premier international organization of women explorers.

She will be speaking on Tibet, the flora, the environment and the people at the Biblioteca Pública, January 9, at 5:30pm.

Early blooming plants in Parque Landeta
By Walter L. Meagher

Plants have two lives—one visible, the other invisible. More than a root is hidden from view for the soil is a seed bank where flowering plants are stored en potencia. Waiting through a cycle of seasons to bloom, each species has its own requirements for breaking dormancy. Hours of daylight, rainfall and temperature must combine in propitious proportions.

One day in winter, an accident occurred in Parque Landeta. A water pipe sprung a leak, water trickled down a slope and green grass grew.

Water was the key, revealing an unexpected richness of plants locked in the seed bank. (A complete list of the names of the plants that bloomed is on page 24 of the Inventory of the Flora of El Charco: 94 species, composing 28 percent of the total flora of the two properties, El Charco and Parque Landeta.)

Rain and drought in San Miguel divide the year into two seasons with periods of transition between them. By May, the dry season that began in November has continued for seven months, leaving the land hungry for water.

At first, rain comes sporadically; then one day in June a new season begins. Arroyos run strong, water sluices through the dam and steep streets become water chutes. Soon flowers bloom, but some bloom before the rain.

Oh, to be a bulb! The least conspicuous of these is the curious and interesting native Euphorbia radians, called Earth Flower (flor de tierra), that is pictured in Richard Cretcher’s pocket guide to flowers. Earth Flower blooms in February, one of the first flowers of the new year. Hard to find, but more abundant in Parque Landeta than in El Charco, the plant rises 6–12cm above ground and is often hidden in tall grass. Earth Flower has a large storage tank underground—a tuber. Tubers and bulbs account for the unusual contribution of Parque Landeta to the flora of the region before the rainy season.

The most attractive native bulb plants in Parque Landeta have Mary Cassatt colors—soft whites, pinks and lilacs. May Flower (Zephyranthes fosteri) has pink-blush petals; the stem and leaves rise from an ovoid bulb. Once bulb plants flower and set seed, the leaves die back and the plant becomes dormant again. This is true for the five monocot and the five dicot species that flower in May and early June in Parque Landeta. Abundant and lovely is the yellow-flowered Echeandia mexicana (no common name). When the land is parched, Parque Landeta alone becomes a colorful garden of spontaneously growing native plants.

The advantage of setting flowers early is that fresh nectar supplies immediately attract winter-hungry pollinators; competition among plants for their attention is minimal. Seeds are set when the ground is wet, securing a further advantage for propagation of the species. Especially attractive are the Mexican Star (Milla biflora) with six white petals and Crowpoison (Nothoscordum bivalve) with purple stripes on white petals. Cousins of the wild onion, these two species belong to the Alliaceae family. Beauties of the transition from winter drought to summer rainfall, they bloom abundantly in the lowland of Parque Landeta, especially on the presa margin.

Walter L. Meagher studied botany at the University of Michigan and the Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State Univ. He is the author of the recently published Inventario de la Flora Espontanea del Jardin Botanico ‘El Charco del Ingenio,’ San Miguel de Allende.