“It doesn’t matter what creed or religion you are, botanical art crosses all boundaries.”
From a tiny mustard seed to a majestic date palm, from obscure desert plants to well-known culinary staples such as garlic and olives, all are magnificent when painted by acclaimed botanical illustrator Sue Wickison.
In June, the New Zealand artist was the recipient of the 2023 Jill Smythies Award for “outstanding diagnostic illustration in botanical art” by the Linnean Society of London, the world’s oldest active society devoted to natural history. It’s a remarkable accolade for Wickison and recognises both her history of botanical illustration and her current work illustrating Plants of the Qur’ān – History and Culture.
Her Plants of the Qur’ān is the completion of an eight-year partnership with senior botanist Shahina A Ghazanfar from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, a mission to illustrate every plant mentioned in the Qur’ān. It is the first book to explore and highlight the cultural history of the 30 most-mentioned plants in the holy book of Islam.
The book is particularly timely, as the natural habitats of many plant communities and animals have either changed or are being lost as a result of global climate warming and human settlement. With many species no longer able to survive in their native areas of distribution, it is invaluable to have them depicted, and the book and an accompanying exhibition at Kew Gardens have attracted favourable criticism in publications largely in the Middle East.
For Wickison, the culmination of the project has left her with both an appreciation of the plants she recorded and the chance to observe some of them growing in her own Waiheke Island garden – a surprising number of the plants mentioned grow readily in New Zealand.
Her interest was initially sparked by a trip to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, but she returned frequently to the Middle East for the book, visiting the Abu Dhabi section of the Empty Quarter (the world’s largest uninterrupted sand mass) and remote farms in the deserts in Sharjah in the UAE.
“In Oman, I travelled by four-wheel-drive into the mountainous Jebel Akhdar area to see heritage plants, including pomegranates and dates,” she says. “I was fascinated by the use of a 2000-year-old irrigation system known as aflaj. This way of sharing and managing water resources involves ancient stone trenches collecting mountain water and channelling it into the village gardens and plantations.”
Some of her subjects were growing much closer to home. Edible ginger, Zingiber officinale, was tracked down at the Koronivia Research Station on Viti Levu in Fiji. The Ethiopian banana, Ensete ventricosum, was even easier to collect – she enthuses about the excellent examples she found near Russell in Northland, and also in the Paloma Gardens, near Whanganui, when she visited in 2019.
“I loved the dramatic deep-maroon purple bracts with their bloom-encased flowers beneath … the colour shift of the maturing fruit was a joy to paint.” Lebanon cedars (Cedrus libani) in the Eastwoodhill Arboretum near Gisborne and the Wellington Botanic Gardens both had the male and female cones Wickison was seeking to record. The ancient and wild olives she saw in Oman were complemented by others from Robinsons Bay Olives and Kāpiti Olives in New Zealand and Olives from Broke in Australia’s Hunter Valley.
Scientific Interest
Born in Sierra Leone, Wickison says her passion for natural history developed during her childhood in the West African nation. Her English father (a teacher, amateur botanist and artist) would take her on plant-hunting expeditions. “By the time I was nine, I knew I wanted to somehow combine art with my scientific interest in plants,” she says.
This enthusiasm led to Middlesex University London, where she completed an honours degree in scientific illustration, specialising in botanical art. Her talent was recognised when the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, accepted her as its first- ever student placement in botanical illustration.
For the next nine years, Wickison worked in the herbarium at Kew, illustrating numerous grasses, sedges, legumes and orchids. In 1986, her skill was recognised with a Winston Churchill fellowship to collect orchids for Kew in the Solomon Islands.
During this assignment, she lived among forestry and logging crews. “I’d hitch rides in helicopters with local geological survey teams.”
However, the impact of logging horrified her. “It was inevitable that some orchid species were being lost. It was crucial I recorded these before they disappeared altogether.” But logging also had a benefit: as she notes, it’s much easier to study epiphytic orchids on a felled tree than have to climb to them. One of several new species of orchid discovered by Wickison at this time was named after her, Coelogyne susanae.
While in the Solomons, Wickison met British civil engineer Bob Barraclough. Instead of returning to Kew, she took on the nomadic life of a globe-trotting engineer’s wife. The couple and their two children variously lived in Nepal, Vanuatu and Tonga before moving to Wellington in 1997.
Even with the demands of a young family, Wickison continued to draw, illustrating books for agricultural and forestry authorities in Nepal and Tonga and back in Aotearoa, on natural history stamp commissions. Over a decade, she painted 50 botanical stamps for 10 Pacific Island countries (including New Zealand) as well as stamps bearing assorted reptiles, insects and fish.
In December 2008, she was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) gold medal for a painting of eight Arisaemas that she exhibited at the RHS Show in London.
Mosque Inspiration
After 17 years on a lifestyle block in the Ohariu Valley at the back of Wellington, Wickison and Barraclough moved to Waiheke Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. The scenery might have changed, but the painting continued unabated as she undertook the Qur’ān project.
The initial inspiration came during a visit to the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi in 2015. She says, “The whole place was astonishing.When I looked at the botanical motifs on the floor and on the walls, I wanted to find out what they represented.
“There was very little information, so I wrote to Gwilym Lewis, a one-time colleague at Kew Gardens, and he put me in touch with Kew senior botanist Shahina Ghazanfar. It was a serendipitous introduction – Shahina had been researching and writing a book about the plants of the Qur’ān for years.”
Their creative partnership was born and a method of working established: Wickison would send a line drawing of a plant for the book to Ghazanfar by email. After notes were made and any amendments done, she would begin work on the watercolour.
The integrity and accuracy of her subjects are so important that Wickison always works from living material, a process that involves repeated visits to sites at different times of the year to capture every aspect of the plant.
It helped that some of the subjects she first saw in the Middle East were easy to grow here. She initially encountered the snake melon or Armenian cucumber (historically, one of the vegetables Moses was asked to provide when he led his people out of Egypt) in the Qur’ānic Plants Garden in the Sharjah Botanical Garden, but later grew it from New Zealand-sourced seed in her Waiheke garden, along with the more prosaic mustard (Brassica nigra), basil, and lentils (Lens culinaris) from French puy seeds.
The plant mentioned most often in the Qur’ān is the date palm. Wickison tasted Ajwa Al-Madinah dates straight from the tree on a remote desert farm in Fili in Sharjah.
“The Hadith [ancient writings that complement the Qur’ān] notes that ‘Ajwa are the dates of the Heaven’. The challenge was to not eat the specimens I was trying to paint!”
In Oman, Wickison was inspired by the Fardh and the Khenaizi varieties of date palm. Her research involved rising very early in the morning, long before the sun was up, to catch the right light to see them clearly. On one trip, she had to repeatedly delay her flight back to New Zealand until the flowers had developed to the stage she wanted to record.
Her methods are exacting: in addition to taking many photos, she records every detail of the subject plant with hand-painted colour notes. “Taking the plant apart to understand the structure, textures and fine colour changes is critical for accuracy.” She also collected, pressed and froze specimens that she left, along with her easel, in a friend’s apartment in Dubai so she could work on them over time.
Wickison often paints a selection of varieties, especially the common plants such as figs, dates, onions and olives. For others, such as the toothbrush tree, Salvadora persica, there is only one species to record.
Once back in her Waiheke studio, she would dissect locally gathered specimens, using a microscope to study detail before drawing and then painting them. She prefers the medium of watercolour “because of the way it captures the details and nuances of colour of the plants and flowers”.
Manna from Heaven
Using fine sable brushes, she starts with the paler hues and gradually builds the intensity of the colour, then adds the markings. The final stage of the painting is done with a dry brush, to “tickle the paper with tiny pointillist marks as a way of accentuating a colour change, sharpening the edges and adding more minute details”. It is precise work requiring a very steady hand and a pair of magnifying glasses.
Each illustration took hundreds of hours to complete, the work often spread over a year to capture the full life cycle – the flowering and fruiting stages as well as any particular characteristics of the plants. “It’s essential that my illustrations are scientifically accurate, but they also have to be aesthetically pleasing.”
She also uses scale – the Ethiopian banana was painted at its natural size, but other plants were greatly magnified. The full microscopic dissection of flowers was particularly important when she painted the insignificant-looking Haloxylon salicornicum collected from Sharjah and Dubai – it’s one of the plants associated with the biblical manna from heaven.
“It looked like a collection of dried twigs with little specks of yellow, but when I popped it under the microscope, I saw tiny 1mm flowers emerging from the succulent stems.”
She went on to draw and paint Haloxylon flowers at 15 and 25 times their natural size. When she returned to the UAE in 2019, she recorded the fruiting stage. “I saw the beautiful colour changes of the winged fruit that covered the stems. There was a transition from apricots through pinks to the paper white, dried parchment-like stage – beautiful.”
Wickison searched for Alhagi graecorum, another “manna from heaven” plant, in many locations before discovering it in the Sharjah Botanical Garden. “That was very lucky. Even more exciting was the fact the plant was flowering and fruiting at the same time in 45°C temperatures.” She brought tiny details to life with a combination of graphite and watercolour at seven times magnification.
Visitors to Kew can now see the results of this exacting work in an exhibition that features Wickison’s art framed and hanging in the garden’s Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Many of the paintings measure 55cm x 80cm unframed, while some, such as the date palm, are monumental in size – those paintings alone measure 63cm x 111cm.
Reflecting on the culmination of close to a decade’s work, Wickison pays tribute to all the botanists, guides and fellow plant enthusiasts she encountered on her journey. “Many people in different countries have shown me kindness, enthusiasm and generosity of spirit. I could not have done it without them.”
The “Plants of the Qur’ān” exhibition runs until September 17 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Wickison’s work will also be exhibited at the Waiheke Distillery from October 27.
Plants of the Qur’ān – History and Culture will be available in New Zealand from next month, but it can be ordered directly from Kew Gardens.