by Catherine Phillips

Beneath the benches of the Desert Collection shade house are several pots of a rare and nocturnal-flowering cactus, Epiphyllum chrysocardium. Here they thrive, lush and sinuous and verdant under the filtered, broken light cast through the wooden slats as if they were growing under the canopy of the Mexican rain forest, where the species first was found.

In one pot is the old embossed aluminum tag with the Huntington accession number 15189. The matching accession card lists two cuttings that arrived at The Huntington with Myron Kimnach when he moved from the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley in November 1962 to become superintendent of the Huntington Botanical Gardens.

Kimnach brought with him the glossy stems of the living plant as well as a dried herbarium specimen, a fragile but unchanging artifact that speaks equally to botanists and historians. Both the living and the pressed plants were cuttings of the original plant first documented by naturalist Thomas Baillie MacDougall in the wetlands of northern Chiapas, Mexico, on Feb. 9, 1951. They survive to remind us of the close collaboration between Kimnach and MacDougall, two men who devoted years to the study of Mexican flora and saw the safe passage of many succulent plants from the wild into cultivation and scientific research.

It was Kimnach who established the herbarium at The Huntington; throughout his tenure he contributed to the archive of preserved specimens as both collector and taxonomist. Although he retired in 1986, he continues to participate in its care even today. Among the many herbarium sheets he has prepared is the mounted E. chrysocardium specimen, an example so large that two sheets of paper are required to lay out both a flower and a stem. The massive faded stem, similar in shape and arch to a fern frond or the huge pinnate leaf of a deciduous ash or hickory tree, presents a profile quite unlike a cactus. Reduced succulence, subdued spines, climbing stems—a taxonomist’s puzzle.

“Here was a cactus that didn’t look like a cactus” is a refrain he has repeated many times about this and other members of the Hylocereae, the group of cacti to which it belongs.

When he was just 12 years old, Kimnach tended his first cactus, a gift from his mother. It was an epiphytic rattail cactus native to Oaxaca and Hidalgo, Mexico. So from the very beginning, Kimnach was drawn to the Hylocereae, the tribe of epiphytic cacti that thrive, far from arid desert habitats, in the humid cloud and rain forests of Central and South America, where they live alongside other epiphytic plants such as bromeliads and orchids. There they find support from triangular, pencil-thin, or flattened stems that scramble and hang like vines, and from roots that establish themselves in the leaf litter on the forest floor or high up in humus pockets in the crotch of an adjacent tree.

The jointed growths of epiphyllums that appear to be leaves—but are actually stems—give each species a distinct silhouette, and it was the strangeness of the silhouette that both perplexed and tantalized Thomas Baillie MacDougall one wet Friday morning in 1951 when he discovered E. chrysocardium. He was descending a steep path through the low clouds and primeval oak and pine stands of the rugged, remote mountains of La Selva Negra, Chiapas, into a heavily shaded ravine, a “botanist’s paradise” of orchids, aroids, dwarf palms, bromeliads, begonias, ferns, and flowering vines:

A remarkable plant caught my eye. Closer inspection showed it to be undoubtedly a cactus, and apparently an Epiphyllum; a terrestrial, with stems arching over the undergrowth until the tips sometimes touched the humus again, to root and form new plants.…An herbarium pad…surprised me by drying within a few days—almost like a true leaf.

The excerpt is from MacDougall’s article written in 1953 for the Cactus and Succulent Journal. Accompanying the piece is a photograph of MacDougall’s guide, Valentin Villareal, holding a glistening lobed pad of E. chrysocardium across the width of his chest, pressed flat against his loose white garment, like a specimen on a white herbarium sheet.

Thomas Baillie MacDougall was born in Scotland in 1895 and grew up in a village on the Sussex Downs. After fighting in the battles of the Sommes and Arras in World War I, he left Europe for the United States in the early 1920s. He trained in forestry in Syracuse, N.Y., and took a position in the nursery business of William and Emmanuel Shemin in the Bronx and later Greenwich, Conn. There, he propagated rhododendrons and hollies and bided his time during the summer months.

With his imagination kindled since childhood by the writings of naturalist W.H. Hudson—and eager to explore a region “rich in rare and unknown species of plants and animals”—MacDougall at age 36 began his journeys to Mexico. From 1931 until his death in Oaxaca in 1973, he spent each dry season (November to May) searching for flora and fauna in the two southernmost states—Oaxaca and Chiapas. He made his base in the Zapotec town of Tehuantepec at the southern Pacific side of the isthmus. From there, he roamed in all directions, exploring the high mountains and cloud forests, sites rich in diversity. He sent thousands of mammal and reptile specimens to the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., and plants to the New York Botanic Garden (NYBG) and later to specialist growers in California.

But, it was not enough to visit a locality, collect, and leave. Rather, MacDougall immersed himself in the very essence and ecology of each place, teaching himself about the plants, insects, birds, archaeology, language, costumes, markets, fiestas, and rituals of the distinct groups of people who lived there. He never drove a car, preferring to walk for days on end with little but a clean shirt, straw hat, flower press, and satchel, sleeping outdoors or finding “posada” with a local family. During the summer months, MacDougall would spend long hours in the New York Public Library, reading anything he could find on Mexico. The depth of his reading altered his interpretation of everything he saw and ultimately the scope and ambition of his legacy as collector and naturalist.

Slight in frame and often elusive to the curious, “Don Tomás” was loved and revered by those who knew him for his self-effacing charm, his warmth and gentle wit, and his indifference to physical discomfort and risk. He was generous with his collections, and he was equally generous with his accumulated knowledge.

In late February 1958, almost five years before he arrived at The Huntington, Myron Kimnach began to correspond with MacDougall. Kimnach was writing a series of articles under the title “Icones Plantarum Succulentarum” for the Cactus and Succulent Journal, concentrating on epiphytic and jungle cacti and species in the Crassulaceae family. Each article was devoted to a comprehensive account of one species. In the fall of 1958, he wrote to MacDougall asking for information for a new article on E. chrysocardium. Had MacDougall collected additional specimens? Did he have anything new to share? Kimnach described taking botanical artist May Blos to the University of California Botanical Garden at midnight to draw the plant, just as the huge fragrant white flower unfolded into its brief, extravagant bloom.

A week later, MacDougall wrote back with praise for Kimnach’s greenhouse skills but offered no new information. A second letter came six weeks later, clarifying the 2,000-foot altitude of the type locality—the mountains in Chiapas where he had collected the original specimen.

In the tone of their letters is something of the shared curiosity, the modesty and tact, the give and take between two self-taught botanists. For five years, these two men who had yet to meet—one almost 30 years older than the other—corresponded between Oaxaca and California, exchanging information about trails, localities, plants in habitat, plants in cultivation, as together they sorted out the epiphytic cacti of southern Mexico.

In October 1962, on the eve of leaving Berkeley and taking up his new Huntington position, Kimnach wrote to MacDougall, confiding to him the excitement of his new endeavor:

Starting Nov. 1, I will be the superintendent at Huntington Botanical Gardens. This should prove to be more interesting work especially because of the huge cactus collection there. I hope to bring in collected material to replace some of the things whose origin is unknown, so that the research value of the collection will be increased. I think I can get starts of most of your things that are already in the U.S., but in the future I hope you can send me some items directly, especially of the epiphytic cacti that you will come across in your travels. I am taking all the cacti that I need from U.C. to carry on my studies, but of course there must be much else of interest yet to be found in Mexico.

It was at The Huntington, in February 1963, that Kimnach met MacDougall for the first and only time. Their correspondence continued until MacDougall’s death, 10 years later. Kimnach never finished the article he had proposed in 1958. Only in 1991 did he return to writing about E. chrysocardium. In a short note in the journal Bradleya, he revised and renamed the plant, placing it in what he considered to be a more suitable genus, Selenicereus, the night-flowering moon cereus.

Kimnach’s short note remains the last taxonomic change for the plant that MacDougall first collected. But curiously, the source of the clone that Kimnach brought with him to The Huntington—both to the herbarium and the nursery—was not MacDougall, but an intermediary link, Edward Johnston Alexander (1901–1985). In the early days of his Mexican travels, it was to Alexander, curator and botanist at the NYBG, that MacDougall sent his collections for identification and determination. Gradually, this partnership soured, as plants sent to Alexander were neglected and new finds were left unnamed.

Although many of MacDougall’s later discoveries remain in the herbarium at the NYBG, those from the early years have disappeared. But there is one item that survives. Deep in the basement of the NYBG herbarium is a collection of specimens pickled in alcohol, a method used to preserve plants that are too fleshy to mount or too big to be contained on one herbarium sheet. There, in a glass jar, is the holotype of E. chrysocardium—the specimen designated by Alexander as the “type” of the species at the time he wrote the plant’s description.

Unlike the brittle, splayed pads on the herbarium sheet at The Huntington, this precious original is wet and three-dimensional and, to the untrained eye, unrecognizable. It floats like a ghostly seaweed, seemingly halfway between life and death, with a flower bud not quite open and not quite closed, forever caught between day and night, colorless like a black and white photograph. It is the spectral remnant of the plant first seen by MacDougall and then grown and described by Alexander. It is what remains of the plant that mesmerized Alexander when he saw it bloom for the first time in cultivation in the early hours of dawn on Jan. 2, 1954. It is what survives of the plant his gardener called “a beauty,” which Alexander named as the epiphyllum with the golden heart (chrysocardium) because of the flower’s central mass of yellow stamens. It is a direct vegetative link to the plant that May Blos drew, that Myron Kimnach renamed, and that endures today at The Huntington, in the herbarium, and in the nursery of the Desert Collection.

Catherine Phillips is a research fellow at The Huntington. She works in the Desert Collection nursery and is researching a biography of Thomas Baillie MacDougall.