Helen Gilkey: A life where art and science met

Sharon Rose never expected to curate an art exhibit. A biology professor at Willamette University in Salem, she and a colleague, Carol Long, were researching early women naturalists when they came across the name Helen Gilkey.

And, as Rose soon discovered, she made pictures and watercolors of plants. "When I was working in the OSU archives with Carol Long, we were going through thousands of letters," Rose said one recent morning as she sat in an upstairs gallery at Willamette's Hallie Ford Museum. "She was a prolific writer. And then I would come up with something like that little painting."

The watercolor she pointed to is part of a small but engaging show of Helen Gilkey's botanical illustrations, which Rose unearthed through a combination of curiosity, sleuthing and plain persistence.

Gilkey was a naturalist and a fungus expert, but she was also a musician, a poet and a polished artist. Shy about her work, she hid much of her art behind a veil of anonymity that was difficult even for Rose to pierce.

The 19 little pen-and-ink drawings and watercolors in "Helen Gilkey: The Art of Botanical Illustration," which continues through March 13 at the museum, are gems of early 20th century illustration. Crisp and realistically drawn, some are done life-size and look almost like pressed flowers. The colors are clean and bright, even today, despite years of storage under less-than-ideal conditions. Gilkey had plenty of practice doing pen-and-ink drawings when she was at Berkeley. She was chief illustrator - anonymously - of "Jepson's Manual of the Flowering Plants of California," the seminal work on the subject. Later she illustrated many of her own textbooks, again without color.

Rose found some pen-and-ink sketches in the archives but didn't turn up many of Gilkey's watercolors. Finally, the biologist found her way to La Rea Johnston, a former colleague and co-author of Gilkey's who was still living outside Corvallis. Rose asked for Johnston's help and was turned down flat. She asked again and again. After weeks had passed, Johnston agreed to a visit. When Rose showed up, she was served tea before being given an old paper sack. Inside she found dozens of Gilkey watercolors of Northwest plants. Gilkey, the colleague explained, had never felt her watercolors were good enough to publish. Johnston had been reluctant to share them with the world even after Gilkey's death in 1972 at the age of 86.

The work was so amazing that Rose took it to Hallie Ford Museum Director John Olbrantz, who decided to do an exhibit. Rose says Gilkey's career was typical of early women naturalists, many of whom found their way into science on the strength of such ancillary skills as illustration. "It's interesting how women get into science," Rose explained. "I call it science from the periphery. Illustration was a way for many, many women to get into botany."

Feb. 29, 2004