STORY BEHIND THE ART OF MALI MOIR

18th Annual

International American Society of Botanical Artists atThe Horticultural Society of New York

Ovuliferous Scale Bunya Pine

Araucaria bidwillii

The summer of 2014 proved an abundant year for the Bunya-Bunya Pine, boasting a newsworthy 200 fruits from a single tree. With 19 trees in the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, RBGM, this amounted to trailer loads of heavy large football sized cones! These cones are approximately 20-35cm in diameter and contain as many as 50 large 3-4 cm seeds. The cones fall to the ground intact and can weigh up to 5kg, a danger in public places, as a falling cone can kill a person. 

The Bunya-Bunya Pine, Araucaria bidwillii, is native to subtropical Queensland in the north eastern part of Australia, and is 1,400 kilometers north from the most southern city on mainland Australia, cold temperate Melbourne, which is my home. There are many plantings of Bunya Pines across Australia and they can grow up to 30–45 m. The tree is a large evergreen coniferous tree in the plant family Araucariaceae. The common name is an Aboriginal word, (bunya-bunya, bunyi, booni-booni or bonya in various Aboriginal dialects). The tree was colloquially named the Bunya Pine by Europeans, but it is not a pine tree (of the genus Pinus). The scientific name honors the English-born Australian botanist John Carne Bidwill, who sent the first specimens to Sir William Hooker in 1843 and who became the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney. 

As I am always looking for interesting material for my botanical art classes at the RBGM, I requested from the garden staff that a few cones be delivered to our art room, in the yet to be restored 1869 Melbourne Observatory building which originally housed The Great Melbourne Telescope, now nestled in the car park on the RBGM grounds. The requested few turned into a pile of heavy, green, spiky-scaled cones oozing with unforgiving clear sticky sap. What excitement was derived from these ‘dinosaur eggs’! There were so many that the staff allowed us to take some home to bake them for dinner; they taste like potatoes to me. I thought I would scatter them in my back yard to see if any would germinate, silly me: they were all eaten by morning. It seems possums love them too.

Over the weeks I observed a fascinating story of germination. The cone scales are stuck tightly together making the whole cone hard and heavy. The rachis is essentially the central core where all the scales are attached and is relatively soft. The rachis began to rot fairly quickly, creating heat, and this in turn triggered the seeds to geminate. I looked down the messy cavity of the large cones and noticed a mass of radicles all shooting in the same direction, down the messy soft rotting core heading for contact with the earth. All the ovuliferous scales were growing. This inspired an idea to paint the story of germination, three paintings in all, from scale, to scale with radicle, to scale with roots and leaves. 

I found the silken reflection on the ovuliferous scale exquisite and it eventually hooked me in to accept the challenge of capturing it in watercolor. My life size painting of this 10cm scale became a salivating haven for intense observation.

My all time favorite medium is watercolor on vellum. Even though it is terrifically difficult to master I also find it reassuringly forgiving. However, after many years of playing with this favorite medium I believe it is still generally best to work in one direction, that is, I try not to back track in my painting process. I try not to erase, I try not to shift the color from one area to another, which ironically are all the things that make vellum a delight to work with. Of course I work from light to dark, as with most transparent media. The mantra to myself while painting the cone scales was “more, more intense, more”. Each time I thought I had made the darks dark enough and rich colors rich enough, I would keep going until they were ‘intense’. This was a tightrope of balance, as I desperately needed to retain the silken refractions of light, whispers of color which only work if perfectly placed, no mess allowed! I used a 000 pure Kolinsky sable brush and engaged a ‘dry brush’ technique. In order to maintain tiny areas of pure color and light I refrained from applying any washes. My observations to paint this were to purely follow the patterns of color, trying not to ‘understand’ but to use an ‘empirical’ approach to seeing.

I was always envious of other botanical artists who could repeatedly paint subjects with that mesmerizing allure of the light reflections similar to shot silk. This was only the second painting I was really pleased with in terms of capturing that silky shimmer of light.

Aboriginal peoples considered this tree a sacred tree and large Bunya festival harvests occurred every few years. Special envoys carrying message sticks from custodians of the trees travelled through surrounding districts to invite selected groups to attend the ceremonial feasts. In what was probably Australia's largest Aboriginal event, diverse tribes – up to thousands of people – once travelled great distances to the gatherings. The meetings involved ceremonies, dispute settlements and fights, marriage arrangements, trade exchange and feasting on the bunya nut. Remarkably, the colonial governors protected this tree from logging between 1842 and 1860, but for almost a century after that there was extensive logging for various commercial purposes, which decimated the forests. Fortunately, the Bunya Mountains National Park was established in 1908 and shelters the world’s largest stand of ancient bunya pines.

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