Packed as tenderly as possible along with the frozen peas and beans in Sue Wickison’s freezer is a pohutukawa sprig, the fragile threads of the flowers rigid with icicles. The sprig has been in and out of the freezer since it burst into bloom last Christmas. Sue needs it for reference as she works on a pohutukawa painting as perfect as the real thing, a blaze of red glowing from the easel in her studio in Ohariu Valley near Wellington. By the time the painting is complete it will have taken more than six weeks of work.
    Sue is not a Sunday flower painter. She did a four-year degree in scientific illustration at Middlesex University, London, and could have ended up doing detailed drawings of body parts for the edification of British medical students. She was attached to Barts Hospital in London for part of the course but painting the sometimes gory minutiae of the body was not for her.
    Her passion for plants, however, was already well instilled. As a small child she had accompanied her father, an amateur botanist, on plant-hunting expeditions in Sierra Leone in West Africa where he worked for the British Colonial Service and where Sue was born.

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