Books
Eagle eyed
by Philip Matthews
A two-volume set of more than 800 plant paintings is a leading contender in New Zealand’s book awards this week. In her own words, AUDREY EAGLE explains how and why she spent 50 years documenting every last New Zealand tree and shrub.
I was born in Timaru. My parents were out from England. They went back again when I was eight. I remember on the first day at school in England, I said, “I’ve come from New Zealand and I’m going back there one day.” I don’t know why I had such a fixation on it. I was so young. But I did.
We were living in the Oxfordshire countryside, near the Cotswolds. Those lovely little villages with the yellow stones and thatched roofs. We were living near an estate that was once a monastery. The grounds were magnificent. The monks had fishponds there. It was developed in the Victorian period into a big estate. By the time I got there, it was wartime and it had deteriorated. Nobody ever went there. So I had all these lovely grounds that I could roam freely in as a teenager.
One year, I thought, I’ll paint the flowers as they emerge. So I did that for a whole season. Not for the joy of making a pretty picture, but so that I could learn about them. I had always enjoyed drawing, from five years old. My father took the books to Kew and asked, would there be any possibility for me to get a job one day? They said I would have to get a degree first. I’m glad because I would have hated to be restricted to living in London.
I loved drawing and I loved the country-side. So I thought I would either go in for forestry or into drawing in some way. I thought of engineering drawing. My father was an engineer and he’d started up a small factory in Banbury. I thought, when the war’s over and the men come back, they’ll go into forestry, but I could still draw – which was the case. I studied engineering part-time for three years and that helped with the drawing, because it made me far more observant and accurate. As an engineer, you’ve got to be accurate to a millimetre or less.
I WAS WORKING in an instrument factory and the war was over. I met the man who was to be my husband. I said, “I’ve come from New Zealand.” I thought I’d better let him know that early in the piece in case he changed his mind. I was definitely going back to New Zealand and I’d started saving. It eventuated that we got married and he was happy to come to New Zealand. Fortunately – there were a lot of fortunate things in my life – he couldn’t get a job in Auckland. We had ordered a caravan to be built for us in Auckland. He got a job in the electricity department in Hamilton and I got a job in the drawing office there, too, so that was excellent. He was an accountant, by the way. Another lovely thing happened. Someone we’d met in Auckland said their mother lived near Hamilton so we could go and live on their farm. We had three years in our caravan on their farm. We saved up to buy our land in Ngaruawahia.
The chief electrical engineer, Athol Caldwell, was a keen amateur botanist. He had planted quite an area of electricity department land in natives. We gathered people around and formed the Forest and Bird Protection Society branch in Hamilton. At the weekend, I would take home one of the plants that Mr Caldwell had planted, a specimen in flower, and paint it. The only reason was to learn the names. After learning the easy names in England, “ladysmock” and things, I then had to learn botanical names and Maori names.
That’s how it started. I slowly went on painting as they came into flower. We’d find plants on Forest and Bird trips. Then, Collins contacted me and said they wanted to do a book of native plant paintings and they had heard about me. I sent them some and they said, “Exactly what we want.” From then on, I had to work hard. I thought, if I illustrate every genus of New Zealand plant, I’ll have a theme. I then had to collect things from all over the country. Our holidays always went somewhere interesting. We had two children. Painting was very difficult in a tent.
I still go on gentle tramps, but I don’t climb mountains any more. I went round Stewart Island in January. I’m going to the Chatham Islands in November. I like to go to these places that I have got plants from.
NOW, THERE’s a Hebe brockiei. And it’s only found in the Amuri Pass. There’s Metrosideros bartlettii, a rata, and that was only discovered in about 1985. A whole tree, it was found up in Northland. A botanist found two or three big trees and a few small ones. That’s all there are in the world of that tree.
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