Part 1

"The gods were in the canyons, in the forest, just out in the bromeliads."

Popol Vuh

In 1935, Mulford Foster and his artist friend were struggling, eager to reach a summit in the Sierra Madre Oriental in the state of Puebla north of Oaxaca city. Their old Chevrolet was laboring, its radiator boiling. But as they reached the crest at 9000', one "plant experience" made them forget all that. The restrained beauty of an unamed "upside down" tillandsia startled them, breaking the gloom of the somber forest, its miniature flowering head of chalky pink overlapping bracts, and flowers with violet petals, hanging down inverted, towards the ground. Decaying pine needles were likely trapped in the muddle of its curving ash-grey leaves (Fig. 1).

Almost two decades later, early in 1971, the Journal of the Bromeliad Society featured on its cover an image of the same tillandsia. It was taken by Werner Rauh. In 1972, a color photograph of the same plant lit up the back page of Cactaceasy Suculentas Mexicanas. It had been taken by Eizi Matuda. Both images were of a tillandsia Lyman B. Smith had described in 1949, twenty-two years earlier, two years after the first of several collections of this species purchased from the Oaxaca Christmas flower market had reached his desk at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. The tillandsia with the "beautiful pastel colors" and "horizontal to drooping" inflorescence had been collected and recorded in the field notes of Scottish naturalist Thomas Baillie MacDougall. Smith did not recognize the plant, but determined it to be a new species--Tillandsia macdougallii L.B. Sm.

In May 1974, the American Museum of Natural History in New York received boxes of letters, fieldnotes, articles and close to 5000 photographs. It was the legacy of words and images of this gaunt diminutive expatriate Scot with a beaked nose, prominent ears and gentle manner (Fig. 2). Thomas Baillie MacDougall (1895-1973) grew up among the cold winds on the Island of Bute, Scotland and the rolling Weald and stark chalk South Downs of Sussex (UK). There, in fields and along rivers, he taught himself to become a naturalist. He studied birds, plants, and fish, reading the books of Charles Darwin, John Muir, Gilbert White, and ornithologist W.H. Hudson.

Perhaps it was the adventures of these naturalists, or perhaps it was the harrowing experience being gassed and injured by shrapnel in the battles in northern France during WWI, but when the war ended, he fled Europe for the New World. In New York he studied forestry and became a nurseryman in the greenhouses of the Shemin family in the Bronx. Every winter, from 1931 until his death in 1973, when the nursery was quiet, he left New York to find his way by steamship and train to the small steamy town of Tehuantepec, in the Isthmus of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, then renowned, through magazines such as the National Geographic and paintings of Diego Rivera, for the Tehuanas--their beauty, their embroidered...