The Blackest Flower in the World

Natural History, May, 1999 by Rob Nicholson

Between a rutted road and a burned field in Mexico, scientists find

The rarest of flower colors, black has always held a special fascination for me. Gertrude Jekyll, the renowned English gardener who revolutionized early-twentieth-century gardening with a sophisticated approach to color dynamics, was acutely aware of the nuances of colors:

What a wonderful range of colouring there is in black alone to a trained colour-eye! There is the dull brown black of soot, and the velvety brown black of the bean flower's blotch: to my own eye, I have never found anything so entirely black in a natural product as the patch on the lowerpetals of Iris iberica. Is it not Ruskin who says of Velasquez, that there is more colour in his black than in many another painter's whole palette?

At her Sissinghurst Castle home, the English poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West--another grande dame of gardening--bled one of her gardens of color and planted only white flowers, a "moon garden" designed for night viewing. Being a contrarian, I toyed with the opposite notion, a garden of all black flowers, and began to compile a list.

Truly black species--not horticultural creations such as black tulips or black violets--are especially rare. So when my friend (and retired plant taxonomist) Richard Weaver told me about a little-known Mexican species with the blackest flowers he had ever seen, he planted the seed of a collecting trip in my mind. Lisianthius nigrescens, I learned, is native only to southern Mexico and Guatemala, where it is known as la flor de muerte, a vernacular name that comes from the local " custom of planting the flower around graves. It was first described by a botanist in 1831 but has since received only sporadic study.

For my trip in search of this "flower of death," I recruited Melvin Shemluck, an old collecting partner and botanist, to be a second set of eyes. We began the project by studying pressed specimens at Harvard's Gray Herbarium and at the Smithsonian Institution to familiarize ourselves with Lisianthius's hanging tubular flowers and to determine when and where we were likely to find the plant in bloom. From a short list of possible sites, we zeroed in on the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The plant had been collected there in 1939 by the (then recently graduated) Harvard botanist Richard E. Schultes, whose later work in Amazonia would make him one of the most important botanists of this century.

In 1938 and 1939, Schultes explored the mountainous terrain of northern Oaxaca--an area known by some as the Chinantla--in search of powerful medicinal plants alluded to in ancient Aztec herbals. There he found and identified various hallucinogenic mushrooms and herbs, and near the small hillside village of Santo Domingo Latani, he also collected a "striking, black-flowered" plant, the object of our curiosity.

We decided to begin our search in the Chinantla, hoping that after fifty years the black Lisianthius still bloomed along the same roads and paths. Our goal was to bring specimens back to the Botanic Garden of Smith College (where I work) for further study of their pigmentation and, if possible, to garner a few clues about this specie' pollination biology.

In the city of Oaxaca, a local research station (Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigacion para el Desarrollo Integral Regional) agreed to collaborate in collecting this and other species on our list and assigned a first-rate field botanist, Raul Rivera, to accompany us. We approached the targeted area from the low-lying tropical farmland of Veracruz and headed south into the Sierra de Villa Alta, a mountainous landscape inhabited by the Zapotec. The road gave the lie to the line on the map; instead of the promised fat red route, we had to navigate a road the mapmaker had obviously never traversed--a ribbon of stones, with large rocks often treacherously positioned between two ruts. Early in the day, we were stopped at a checkpoint where twenty-five well-armed officers were searching for drugs. Raul was blase about the episode, but to us it had the feel of entering a garden unlike any we were used to.

Crawling ahead at a few miles an hour in our undersized rental car, we maneuvered around high bumps in the road, fallen trees, and rivers. Looking out the windows for any signs of black flowers, we were struck by the human disruption of the natural landscape. The Chinantla had drawn botanical explorers for centuries, and a few remaining giant strangler fig trees gave us the impression of how mighty its forests had once been. Now patches of intact forest alternated with amazingly steep fields of crops. The degree of forest disruption depended on the crop: sun-loving corn requires total removal of standing vegetation, while coffee, which needs some shade, is cultivated under a canopy of trees. As we bumped along, we occasionally stopped to collect plants, seeds, and herbarium specimens. Here and there a broken tree limb lay next to the road, and we would delight in the beautiful bromeliads and orchids growing on the bark.