Florida A&M University journalism professor, amateur botanist and photographer Michael Abrams made a startling discovery while doing research for an essay on the symbolism of the passion flower.

A Google search turned up an article in the Cincinnati Inquirer about Flemish Renaissance artist Joos van Cleve’s painting “Madonna and Child.” Among its profusion of religious symbols – cherries for resurrection and eternal life, a carnation for the tears the Virgin Mary shed as Jesus carried the cross – is a passion flower.

The reporter in Abrams immediately hollered “Stop the presses!”

He knew from his research that the passion flower was unknown to Europe until reports of its discovery filtered back from the New World long after van Cleve painted the work.

Phone calls were made. E-mails were exchanged. The Cincinnati Art Museum removed the painting from display and examined it under a microscope. The findings confirmed Abrams’ suspicions – the passion flower was added to the work 70 to 150 years after van Cleve painted it.

Thus one man’s passion for flowers rooted out a riddle and then helped solve it.

“I started out trying to learn as much as I could about the passion flower, which is blooming all around Tallahassee right now and is so beautiful,” Abrams said. “I’m not an art historian, for goodness sake! I’m not even a botanist. I was just there by serendipity, trespassing into the austere and erudite world of art history.”

You can read all about how Abrams solved his own fascinating “Da Vinci Code” puzzle in the first-person account of his odyssey posted at his Web site www.flwildflowers.com. You won’t be the only one checking it out.

More than a decade after Abrams created it, it’s the top site on Google among millions that mention Florida wildflowers. It regularly gets visitors from around the globe. The images posted on the site – most taken by Abrams, others sent to him by other Florida wildflower enthusiasts – have been used in magazines and scholarly journals. One of Abrams’ photos was included in Gainesville’s Florida Museum of Natural History’s recent “Pollination Parade.”

Abrams’ adventure in art history has generated a flurry of hits at the site from curious visitors from Joos van Cleve’s native Netherlands. It has also stirred considerable interest in the art world.

“Normally, when a painting enters a collection, it’s very closely inspected,” said New York art writer and editor John Haber, who’s working on his own account of the van Cleve discovery for his webzine. “It’s rare for such discoveries to be made by someone who’s not an art historian.

“You don’t want to judge a painting until you look at it in real life. This one looked very likely to be a genuine van Cleve. Yet even in reproduction, it jumped out at me that there was no reason to have one flower growing out of another (as the passion flower sprouts from the carnation).”

Questions remain. Why was the bloom added – and by whom?

“What I’d be willing to guess, based on my experience, is that a later owner had the passion flower added after it was discovered and popularized for its vague similarities to the instruments of the Passion (of Christ),” said Andy Haslit, a curatorial assistant at the Cincinnati Art Museum.

“This kind of thing happened all the time, where a later owner would have changes made to a painting. They weren’t as touchy about art as we are today. They’d view adding a flower to a painting like we’d view adding onto a house.

“I don’t think it was a clever act of subterfuge. I think they just did it without giving it much thought at all.”

While Abrams’ find adds a tantalizing footnote to the history of van Cleve’s “Madonna and Child,” it shouldn’t affect the painting’s value. The museum has no plans to remove the work from its substantial and significant Renaissance art collection, which includes a Titian, a Botticelli and a Mantegna.
Wild about flowers

Along with sending him through the halls of a museum on a hunt for clues to a conundrum, Abrams’ obsession with Florida’s flowering plants has led him to some strange and wonderful places much closer to home.

He has photographed the rare night-blooming wild petunia just before sunrise outside the Olin Ordnance gunpowder plant in St. Marks. He has exulted in the glory of a vast, swampy meadow of pitcher plants in full bloom in the Apalachicola National Forest. He has strapped his camera to a tree in Jefferson County to shoot the tiny, waxy blossoms of the greenfly orchid.

Abrams’ favorite haunts include the savannas and roadsides of Liberty County, the Angus Gholson Nature Park near Chattahoochee, the forested trails of the Florida Caverns State Park near Marianna, and the Alum Bluff trail in the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve near Bristol.

Such wide open spaces seem a long way from the newsroom where Abrams served as a general-assignment reporter and, later, assistant city editor for the Democrat from 1973 to 1978.

“I covered a little bit of everything,” Abrams said. “I really liked investigative reporting.”

Abrams once infiltrated the robe room of the Florida Supreme Court, tried on one of the judicial garments and had the photographer accompanying him take a picture. It appeared on the front page of the Democrat, much to the consternation of the court’s security officers.

Abrams later left the newspaper to earn a doctorate in journalism at the University of Missouri. He joined the FAMU j-school faculty in 1981 and currently helms its graduate program. He often takes his students on nature hikes around the FAMU campus.

Those expeditions – and Abrams’ passion for Florida wildflowers – grew out of a general interest in outdoor pursuits.

“I used to bike the St. Marks Trail with my camera and take pictures of flowers and things,” Abrams said. “I took some to (botany professor emeritus) Loran Anderson at the herbarium at FSU and he encouraged me to keep doing it.

“I was inspired. It just built and spiraled from there. It got to where I needed to be out there, needed to see the insects and the flowers.”

Abrams’ hobby blossomed into obsession as he devoured books about natural history. He spent one summer reading everything he could get his hands on by Stephen Jay Gould.

“I was kind of desperate to learn about things,” Abrams said. “I was out there every week, walking through bogs, ruining shoes, ruining equipment.”

It was a good thing that Abrams hadn’t invested in a pile of expensive camera equipment. He uses a Nikon FE and a couple of macro lenses to capture his images.

Abrams enlisted his not-always-willing family to go along on his field trips. Children Matthew, Vivi, Melissa and Deborah didn’t share Dad’s enthusiasm. Abrams had to pay Deborah – at 13, the only chick left in the nest now – to go on hikes with him.

“I would pay her a quarter for pointing out things like mushrooms and flowers,” he admitted.

Wife Rochel, however, has been more tolerant.

“I enjoy the hiking, and he enjoys the flowers,” she said. “While he’s taking pictures, I hike up and down the trail.”

The expeditions also give the couple a chance to spend time together, away from the demands of home and work (Rochel works for Adult and Community Education with Leon County Schools).

“When you have two parents working and four kids, it’s a way to get away and have some alone time,” she said.

Abrams admits he lacks the technical proficiency of a real photo pro. Even so, he endeavors to capture the inner as well as the outer beauty of a wildflower.

“I don’t want to take botanical pictures,” he said. “I want to take pictures that say something more than ‘This is a flower.’

“I’m sometimes in such a hurry to take a picture that I don’t get my settings right, but the pictures still come out all right.

“There’s always something dramatic going on if you wait long enough.”

Copyright ©2006 Tallahassee Democrat.