"Botanical journeys: life in full bloom"
Endless forms most beautiful
Article & photos by Liza Hamilton, 'Waiheke Weekender'Botanical journeys: life in full bloom
From the outdoor classrooms of Sierra Leone and Kiribati to becoming a scientific illustrator at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, Sue Wickison’s globetrotting botanical adventures have opened the door to a world of beauty. Scientific illustrator Sue Wickison moved to Waiheke when she fell in love with a slice of bush paradise in the winter rain, but since arriving, her focus has been firmly on the plants of the Holy Qur’an, not the island’s lush flora.
A publishing deadline with Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew has kept her at her easel, with many hundreds of hours of meticulous painting. It’s part of a five-year epic project with travel back and forth to the Arab-sphere, off-roading through deserts and remote regions to accurately capture her plant subjects for a groundbreaking newbook in collaboration with Dr Shahina Ghazanfar of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
The result is "Plants of the Qur’an – History and Culture", the first book to examine the flora in a major ethnobotanical text, illustrated with 30 of Sue’s vibrant and technically astute paintings.
The marathon to complete the project soon achieved, Sue can turn her attention to building works at her new island home, with a little more time to relax on the deck of her new pad, listen to the tūī and the kākā swoop through the trees and enjoy the sea views out to Pakatoa Island.
For Sue, the seed for Plants of the Qur’an was sown back in 2015 when she walked across the marble floors, inlaid with mosaic flowers and vines, of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. “It’s an astonishing building,” Sue told Weekender. “The immense carpet inside [which spans over 30 acres] is the largest hand-knotted carpet in the world and it was made from New Zealand wool. They would find what they felt was the best quality product from wherever in the world they wanted to source things.”
The visit sparked Sue’s curiosity about the plants depicted in the Qur’an, and while she found one book that was well-researched on the subject, it was not illustrated. “So I thought that was something I could do, illustrate the plants in the Qur’an.”
In correspondence with a friend and former colleague at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, Sue asked for some guidance on the plants in the Qur’an. She was introduced to Dr Shahina Ghazanfar, senior botanist at Kew. “She had been writing for years the book The Plants of the Qur’an, about the history and the culture, and she just had an illustrator drop out on her about a week before
I rang her; so the serendipity…
“She’s Muslim and a northern hemisphere botanist and I’m a non-Muslim southern hemisphere artist and so it is a great collaboration of minds and skills.” Sue marvels at the brilliance of the natural world through her precise and delicate watercolours, crafted to capture the essence of a plant in the way photography rarely can. Equally rigorous research is vital to her work style, and so she has travelled within the United Arab Emirates, through the deserts of the Empty Quarter and across Abu Dhabi into areas around Dubai to discover more about the plants and their habitats.
Her research also took her to Oman and into the almost inaccessible Al-Hajar mountain area of Jebel Akhdar, famous for its labyrinth of wadis and terraced orchards which produce pomegranates, apricots and roses. Sue was impressed by the ancient engineering technologies still employed there to transport water down from the mountains. Some practices have stayed the same for generations.
“This was used to irrigate the terraced gardens, whether it was pomegranates or olives or figs,” said Sue. “From my perspective, you travel and you see how things have been grown for generations and there’s authenticity to the project.
“You get to see these amazing stone falaj systems that run for hundreds and hundreds of kilometres that bring the water down
from the mountains.”
Research for this botanical journey through the Qur’an has been self-funded and largely reliant on the generosity of friends and strangers in far off lands. When Sue couldn’t get into Saudi to research the date palm, one of the most important plants featured in the Qur’an, she was redirected to Sharjah.
“People were helping me get to places,” she said. “I was lucky enough to be helped by the royal family in Sharjah and given access to their farm out in the desert that had a couple of the special Ajwa Al Madinah date palms. I visited the palm several times over a couple of years, so several trips back to the UAE. And then I had to wait for the flowers to open.”
Phases of the moon had to be taken into account, with long waits and delayed flights so Sue could be there at the right time for blooming.
“Finally, I got the call and whizzed out to the desert to see this very early morning flowering date palm.” Sue takes photographs to act as a memoir, but always works from live material. In this instance, farm workers were waiting anxiously nearby as the sun came up and when she eventually finished her study, they swooped in.
“What I found out is you have male and female flowers and they would cut the male flowers and put them down on top of the
female flowers and then cover them over to keep the pollen in,” she said. “The sun coming up was heating the pollen and that was just going to fly away. To maximise pollination they came out with these brown paper bags to keep it all together and maximise the crop of dates.”
Learning about history and culture through plants, says Sue, adds another dimension to her botanical illustrations. This has become more affecting as plant species disappear due to our escalating climate crisis.The loss of a species means that there is also a loss of history and culture that is associated with it in its native environment. It is true that plants can be cultivated and saved from extinction, but the cultural history which a plant carries with it in its native habitat cannot be carried on through cultivation in another place. Plants of the Qur’an advocates the conservation and sustainable use of plants and their habitats as much as the co-author’s research and investigation.
Botanical illustration, says Sue, is not just about pretty pictures. While some might question its merits in the modern day with advanced camera technology, Sue says a good botanical illustration is important, particularly when it comes to education.
“It’s the power of observation, making copious notes, you turn it over, look at it from all angles, you feel the texture,” she said. “It’s getting to know the plant, taking it apart, that’s why I do microscope work because you can then understand the botanical structure and how it fits together; if you know how it fits together then you can draw it more accurately. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why still use illustration for books?’ obviously it’s less and less nowadays, ‘Why not take a photograph?’
“Certainly, with scientific illustration you have a line drawing you have to be specific about the shape of the petal, the shape of the leaf, whatever, the botanical characteristics of the plant are absolutely key. “A photograph would give you an overall impression, and there’s amazing micro photography that you can do that’s clearer, but with a line drawing there’s no question about it, and also with a line drawing everything is brought into focus.”
From her time working at Kew, Sue said it was often practice to combine specimens. “Botanists would say these are the main characteristics,” she says. “It’s all the same species, but you might be combining specimens from different countries and times in history to create the characteristics of the perfect plant. Guidance from the botanist is key to make sure you are not drawing the atypical specimen.”
This mode of working helps develop an analytical mind, something her father Wick encouraged from an early age. “I have been really lucky,” says Sue. “I
was born and brought up in Sierra Leone in West Africa. Dad was a teacher and an amateur botanist, so he would go out in the bush collecting plants that were used in his teaching, but he was writing a book on plants in West Africa as well.
“He would go out and collect plants and I would accompany him as a child. I know that’s what sparked my interest in the bush, plants, expeditions and enquiries. Observation, that’s the key thing.
“Looking at plants had a use, which ones were dangerous, which were useful. It was that initial observation from an early age and I think that stemmed from Dad.”
Aged nine, Sue and the family moved to Kiribati, then known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, before eventually being sent to boarding school in England.
“I went from a school in Kiribati where all your school studies were outside, you were on the reef in your bare feet,” she said.
“Then I went to prep school in the UK, a bit of a Victorian prep school, it was freezing cold, I always felt the cold, and I was bullied because I was different; you look different when you come from the Tropics with a tan and white hair, so that was a bit of a culture shock.”
Sue later switched to the Rudolf Steiner School which was completely opposite and ‘fabulous’. “I went from one extreme to the other,” she says. “There was music and poetry, it was very focused on art with an eclectic style of teaching and also international studies as well, it was very encompassing, so that was great.”
Art was the path Sue chose to follow, and she whiled away many childhood hours working on black and white detailed drawings or charcoal sketches. Combining her love for natural history and botany, she says she was lucky to find a course in London merging the two, a four-year degree course
in scientific illustration.
“The first year you do a bit of everything, typography, photography, figure drawing, printing and painting, it was very general arts, and then you specialised,” she said.
“It’s biological, medical, botanical and zoological and then you specialise down in the final year. It’s an arts course with a scientific twist.” While some students were posted to hospitals to work as medical illustrators or off to London Zoo, Sue was destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.
“It was very much about observation, learning to record, accuracy, putting across information in a very clear way,” says Sue. “That’s basically the criteria, so at Kew when I first got there you get given the jobs that nobody else wants to do, so I was working on grasses, tiny little fiddly things. “I was dissecting little grasses under the microscope and the outer case is always quite hard and you stick a scalpel in it and it will ping off and you end up on your hands and knees trying to find tiny specimens to preserve for posterity.”
Sue said Kew was a fascinating place to work, but was relieved to be promoted to rushes, then legumes and finally to orchids. “The botanists would always get out to the Amazon or go up to some really interesting places so I said, ‘Why can’t the artists go?’ Because you were working with pressed specimens all the time and then you can actually see the plants growing you can understand the structure, so they said ‘Okay we’ll give you a project, but you have got to find the funding’ and it was to collect orchids in the Solomon Islands for a book.”
Sue was lucky to be awarded a Winston Churchill travelling fellowship for the expedition and set off with the intention of spending four months in the Solomons to collect orchids. Once there, she photographed, drew and painted plants in the wild, recording pertinent botanical and geographical details. Walking into remote areas with guides or travelling by helicopter into inaccessible locations with prospecting geologists, Sue was able to find plants new to science.
“Reaching areas where few people have been before has been one of the highlights of my life, and the excitement of finding orchids in full bloom in such inaccessible places is an incredible experience never to be forgotten”.
Sue discovered several new species of orchid and was honoured to have one, Coelogyne susanae, named after her.
“It was amazing,” she said. “I was out in the bush and in areas where you ate what you grew basically or what you caught, fish and veges.
“There was quite a lot of logging, so there were all these amazing trees being felled, when the trees were horizontal you could get along them and find the orchids that were normally way up in the canopy. It was awful destruction, but you could record it.”
Sue met her future husband Bob on this trip, so the initial four months stretched into two years. A civil engineer also from the UK, he was seconded to the government by British Aid Overseas. “He was working on infrastructure, building wharfs, roads, airstrips, he has always said it’s really rewarding because you can see how you make lasting changes for a community on a practical level.” The couple later moved to Nepal where they married and then to Vanuatu where they raised their two young children, Charlotte and Nicholas.
“They’ve both got Vanuatu middle names as a sign of respect for the country and the people,” said Sue. “It’s great because you learn to be a minority in someone else’s country and you see other cultures, it gives you a much greater understanding of other people’s cultures. Travel widens your thinking, broadens your mind and you get an appreciation for how other people live.”
Later the family moved to Lesotho in Southern Africa, for work overseeing construction of medical centres in the mountains. “Again, all practical, community projects,” said Sue. “I can take my work with me wherever we go. In Nepal I was working on illustrating a book for plants used for slope stabilization, and so it was used for the community to illustrate which plants have long root systems.
“Where you put in roads, you would obviously get erosion. But then you would plant for slope stability. In Vanuatu I was working on a book for forestry on ethnobotanical plants, so the uses of plants. Wherever I am I have managed to pick up work.”
Sue has produced 50 natural history stamp designs for ten Pacific Island countries (including New Zealand) and she has exhibited internationally with work in several collections worldwide. The whole family are New Zealand citizens and in recent years they have called Wellington home, but Sue is grateful for the opportunity to move to Waiheke’s warmer climate and be near her Auckland-based daughters.
Working on botanical commissions, she will soon start several large pieces for the Rothschild family, and she has been invited by her neighbour, Waiheke Distilling Company, to collaborate on labelling for a new product to be released in the New Year.
Sue has also developed a line of botanically inspired products from silk scarves to aprons and tote bags. They bear the slogan, ‘To plant a garden is to believe in the future’ and Sue says that is a maxim she can live by.