Part 2

MacDougall took over 160 photographs of bromeliads, with over one third being found in the markets or used in a domestic setting. He photographed others as ornaments on wayside crosses (Fig. 1). The quantity of bromeliads he found in the market curb stalls makes them almost seem like surrogate wild collections. The quality of these images makes the photographs appear to stand in for herbarium specimens, as if he was extending the documentary capacities of his camera, even though certainly some of the plants he photographed ultimately became pressed vouchers with some of his images accompanying them (Figs. 2 & 3). Why were the specimens he sent Lyman B. Smith so often from markets, why do his photographs seem to replicate herbarium specimens, and why do these images seem to carry equal weight to his collections, especially as over time, like Edouard Andre in the Andes, he grew to love what both men saw as this neglected plant family "waiting to be pushed out into the light of science"? In a letter from 1951 to his close friend, botanist Margery Carlson, MacDougall gives us some answers:

Matuda [Eizi Matuda] appears to be making a special study of the avoids of Chiapas, but I know of no one working on the bromels of Mexico. Ofcourse Lyman B. Smith is the overall authority but the family most certainly needs to be studied in the field. From the point of view of a gardener I find the Tillandsias of southern Mexico, most interesting, but have tended to avoid them because of the bulk.

A few years later he explained himself once again, this time responding to entreaties from California nurseryman David Barry: I

I am sorry to neglect the Bromels, but they are too bulky for me. A grower of these, out with a light panel truck, who could collect flowering size plants of the large Tillandsias in southern Mexico, could really have something to show for his efforts.

It was not only their bulk that "scared" him away. It was also their "texture," for bromeliads can be painful to handle and often are perched so high up in the forest canopy or straddling a vertical cliff that they are inaccessible or time-consuming to reach. They can be equally as labor intensive to dry and prepare for an herbarium.

He also found them vulnerable as imports, because of the "tightening of restrictions [in the 1950s] on plant exportation especially with Orchids and few officials distinguish between a Bromel and an Orchid."

MacDougall had experienced all these difficulties acutely during the 1947- 48 season when he began collecting so widely for Lyman B. Smith. It seemed to have been an extraordinarily productive year. He took twenty-seven photographs and sent seventeen different taxa to Smith (Fig. 4). Yet despite this, MacDougall called 1947-48 a failed season for bromeliads as it seems likely that he sent more to Smith that did not survive or were unsatisfactory for determination. One of the casualties of 1947-48...