Margaret Mee must rank as one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. She was an intrepid explorer of the Brazilian rainforest and an outstanding botanical artist, acclaimed by botanists and art critics worldwide. At the age of 47, Mee started exploring the Amazon in the footsteps of great British explorers such as Richard Spruce and Henry Walter Bates travelling throughout the wildest parts of Amazonia for the next thirty years. Mee learned to live with the forest and its plants, animals and people and learnt much from the Indians about the trees and plants she so meticulously painted. Mee initially sketched the plants in the forest and then worked on the large illustrations of the entire plant in her studio in Rio de Janeiro. Nine of these plants recorded by Mee, previously unknown to science, are now named after her. "Flowers of the Amazon Forests: The Botanical Art of Margaret Mee" illustrates more than sixty of Mee's major works with additional sketches painted whilst in the forest. The text is taken directly from the diaries she kept whilst travelling giving a wonderful insight into the Amazon - something very few people have actually seen. Mee was an ardent conservationist and was well known for her outspoken views on the destructive exploitation of the Amazon forests. This book is a small tribute to her great work.

Margaret Ursula Mee, MBE (22 May 1909 – 30 November 1988) was a British botanical artist who specialised in plants from the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. She was also one of the first environmentalists to draw attention to the impact of large-scale mining and deforestation on the Amazon Basin.

Mee married Reginald Bruce Bartlett in January 1936. Like her husband, she became a committed trade union activist for the Union of Sign, Glass and Ticket Writers and joined the Communist Party. Mee addressed the TUC in 1937, proposing the raising of the school-leaving age and was subsequently offered, but declined, a job with Ernest Bevin. The marriage to Bartlett was not happy and, after a long separation, ended in divorce in 1943. She later married Greville Mee, who was also attending Saint Martin's School of Art, in the late 1940s.