Meet the botanical hero of The Fire Portrait! This is Aloe buhrii, the "armoured" aloe that Frances spots through her binoculars, clinging to the mountain above her home on the edge of the Karoo semi-desert in South Africa.
Through the glasses it looks "pinkish, its tentacled leaves clasped around its heart as if in prayer." When she climbs closer, it seems as if the plant had rolled across the veld and anchored itself just before falling down the mountainside. From that position, it didn't spread out those thorny leaves for balance, but bundled them together in what Frances calls a "circular arrangement of barbed wire".
I first came across this strange plant when visiting the Karoo Desert Botanical Garden in Worcester, some 100 km north of Cape Town. It's found mainly in a small area of the Northern Cape and is considered endangered. I was instantly intrigued and saw it as the perfect specimen for Frances to paint. Such was its oddness, I could imagine it attracting attention wherever it was shown.
And so it proved to be. Collectors have an appetite for what they can't see around them every day: unusual aloes, cryptic Lithops, veld lilies... and Frances starts to win commissions from abroad. The pink, armoured aloe is her first success and perhaps the key to her future. And someone else's?
The painting hangs on a side wall in my Dallas office and always draws attention.
It's become a reference point for me, and an incitement to break boundaries.
It shows, without compromise, the ability of nature to take circles and lines and twist them into a shape that holds not only life, but beauty, within its distortion.
A rare thing...
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