After graduating Sue spent nine years as a botanical artist with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working under some of the world’s foremost botanists. She graduated from grasses and sedges to legumes then on to the most spectacular plants of all – orchids – under the direction of Dr Philip Cribb.
    At Kew each plant was meticulously drawn from pressed specimens – sometimes a century or more old – from Victorian collecting expeditions.
    Hundreds of Sue’s drawings grace the pages of scientific papers and books put out by Kew, the Royal Horticultural Society (UK) and popular gardening and botanical publishers.
    She was sent on a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship to the Solomon Islands to collect orchids for Kew and discovered several new orchids including Coelogyne susanae which was named after her. There she met her husband and the couple settled in New Zealand twelve years ago.
    Now their two children are teenagers she’s once again deeply involved in the painstaking work of accurately recreating plants and flowers on paper. They glow around her house – purple and yellow tulips, clear green orchids and elegant portraits of various New Zealand natives, all traditionally and finely detailed. New Zealand natives are her current focus. They’re a new challenge with their often quirky structure.

She eventually aims to illustrate a book on them as a national record of the unique flora here and to follow in the footsteps of Wellington botanical artist Nancy Adams.
    Using photographs along with the living plant, she builds up layer on layer of watercolour glazes, each layer needing to be perfectly dry before the next is applied. She works from the lightest colours to build realistic intensity, leaving the paper white where she intends a light or highlight effect. She works with two sable brushes, one for paint and one for water to feather and smooth out the layers of colour.

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