It is 2020!

The last couple of months I have been drawing mostly plants from the Sapotaceae family. The illustrations will accompany the descriptions of species in the revised volume of Sapotaceae of the Flore de Madagascar by botanists of the Conservatoire et Jardin Botaniques de Genève.

It is a big project and I am very happy to be part of it. It means a lot of work for a while so I have been trying to be careful with my time-management skills that still need a bit more fine tuning. But this project is so cool and I am learning a lot. A the moment I have drawn mostly species of the Capurodendron genus that will be published soon. There was also one species of Labramia and now I am finishing one Mimusops. As they are in the same family there are common basic characters, but each genus has its particular difficulties. After drawing the Mimusops flower and all of its appendices I was glad to come back to the “simple” or simpler Capurodendron flowers :). All of my drawings are done from dried herbarium specimens as reference, very often the typus of the species (how lucky am I?!).

The original volume for the Sapotaceae was written by A. Aubréville in 1974. Around half of the described species have illustrations. The illustrations where done by J. Saussotte-Guérel. I found out in an old journal that the artist is a woman. Indeed it is “Mlle. J. Saussotte-Guérel” in Bibliographie, Bulletin de la Société Botanique de France, 1968, 115:3-4 p. 283, although I could not find her name. Anyway, I find that pretty cool, as I have to draw some of the species that she already did, adding details and elements.

If you are curious, the Flore de Madagascar et des Comores is available in the Biodiversity Heritage Library site. Here is a link to the volume 164: Sapotaceae.

Here is an example of a page in the 1974 flora and some examples of what I am doing, yet to be published by L. Gautier & al.