The colourful world of Sue Wickison
Sue Wickison was born and brought up in Sierra Leone. After a life spent living in far-flung and exotic countries, she and her family moved to New Zealand in 1997, and to Waiheke Island in 2020.
Sue’s a qualified Scientific Illustrator. A part of her career was spent at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London. While she was there, she was given an assignment to record and collect orchids. A Winston Churchill fellowship enabled her to travel to the Solomons for this work. Microscope dissection drawings of the orchids were collated into a publication with Kew and Sue had the honour of an orchid Coelogyne susanae named after her in recognition of the years of work and new species found.
While on the Solomons, a Mexican tequila party, a red rose, and a walk along a bush road to view endemic orchids were elements that blossomed into a romance, and saw Sue extend her intended four-month stay to two years.
Normally based in the remote region of the Western Solomons, Sue was invited to a tequila party in the capital Honiara and that’s where she met her future husband, Bob, an English born, Cambridge educated Civil engineer. He was building wharfs, roads and airstrips, infrastructure that brought about lasting changes for the community.
Bob lived in the capital Honiara and Sue was based in a remote area of the country accessible by a tiny 9-seater plane. Care packages of cheese, and food that could not be caught or grown locally, would be sent up with the pilot from Bob. The treats on one occasion, included a red rose. Sue was smitten.
A move to Nepal followed, where the couple married. Sue’s botanical interests led to a quest for finding useful plants, to slow soil erosion after roads were built. In the Nepalese mountains she illustrated a book showing long rooted plants that could be used to educate communities about plant use for slope stabilization.
The couple next spent several years in Vanuatu where they had two children, Charlotte and Nick. Sue also used the time to illustrate an ethnobotanical book on the uses of plants for the Vanuatu Forestry Department. It was then on to Tonga where Sue continued her illustration work on natural history philatelic stamps for the Kingdom and nine other Pacific countries, including New Zealand.
Postings to both Fiji and the remote “Kingdom in the Sky” of Lesotho in Southern Africa provided both her and Bob with opportunities to work and research, Bob overseeing construction of medical centres in the mountainsand Sue continuing her passion, hunting for unusual or rare plants. It was in a very remote area of Lesotho, high in the Drachenberg mountains, in a restricted 10-kilometre area of rockpools, that Sue found one of the tiniest and rarest watereliels. She recorded the waterlily onto vellum. It is now in the Shirley Sherwood Collection in London.
In New Zealand, Sue has worked on endangered species of plants, and the Short-tailed bat, and her work is in the Auckland Museum Collection.
Her most ambitious project has been to research, collect and record over an 8-year period, The Plants of the Qur’an in conjunction with a senior botanist at Kew Gardens. To ensure the authenticity of the work, Sue travelled to deserts in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates recording tiny plants and to remote areas of the mountains of Oman to see how crops like pomegranate, olives, dates, and grapes had been grown and irrigated for generations. The ancient stone channels of the falaj system brought water down from high in the mountains to the collective farms around villages, a co-operative watering system that’s over two thousand years old.
In 2023 the impressive collection of 31 large paintings were shown at Kew in a five-month solo exhibition coinciding with the launch of the book, Plants of the Qur’an, History and Culture. The success of the show was indicated by an outreach to over 1.5 million people and pulled different cultures together in a positive way. The book is in its 3rd printing in less than a year. To order the book click the link Plants of the Qur’ān, History and Culture
To cap Sue’s career pinnacle, in the same year, she was the sole recipient of the Jill Smythies award, an international award given annually by the Linnean Society of London for outstanding diagnostic illustrations in botanical art.
On Waiheke Island, Sue has developed a range of quality and exquisite silk, cotton and linen retail products showcasing some of her plant illustrations. To view an exhibition of original paintings of unusual plants, see Sue’s work at the Waiheke Distillery at the Eastern end of the island. Sue illustrated the labels for the Distillery’s range of three vodkas.
Sue with her linen Grape tea towel.
To view more of her work, or to read more about her, and to view her retail products, go to www.suewickison.com
Win with Shared Kitchen
Sue has a range of cotton and linen tea towels and aprons, and exquisite silk scarves, printed with her gorgeous illustrations. She has kindly donated a selection of her products for our next Gift Subscription offer. This gift is so good that I have opened it to all current Annual Subscribers, including international subscribers, and to new Annual Subscribers who subscribe before 21st April 2024. If you are a current subscriber, you don’t have to do anything. If you have been thinking about subscribing for a while, here is your incentive. This is an amazing prize package, total RRP $159.00.
1 x 100% Linen Tea Towel Figs
1 x 100% Linen Tea Towel Grapes
1 x 100% Linen Tea Towel Olives
1 x 100% Linen Apron Pomegranate
And because it is harvest month, we are including a few extras for New Zealand subscribers: a packet each of our gorgeous Toasted Hazelnuts and Hazelnut Dukkah, taking the total value of the prize to just under $180.00.
