Plants are hardly given the attention they deserve. Though they nurture us, give us oxygen, and beautify our lives and world, they are more or less ignored. Bengaluru-based botanical illustrator extraordinaire Nirupa Rao, is doing her bit to make botany and the beauty of the plant world popular again.
As a child Nirupa loved to draw plants, copying the botanical illustrations her aunt sent her from Australia. Back then, drawing plants “wasn’t exactly deemed a profession in India” she says. After a short stint at Bloomsbury Publishers, London, she found herself drawn to the visual aspects of books, and realised her true calling was art.
Nirupa’s depiction of the fruit of tropical evergreen tree cullenia exarillata, much loved by lion-tailed macaques, exemplifies attention to detail.
Cover photo: Nirupa Rao has found her calling in the unusual profession of botanical illustrator.
Nirupa’s family has its fair share of expert botanists who encouraged her interests. Being an admirer of the world of flora, she took an online course in botanical illustrations when she found out “it was actually a thing!
Before long, Nirupa found herself working on a botanical documentation project with the Mysore-based Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF). “I met Divya Mudappa from NCF at a plant identification course in Kerala, and found that they wanted to document trees in ways other than photography. Photographing trees is difficult—their huge canopies can look a mass of green, with the details lost—and large trees are impossible to fit into one frame.” NCF wanted to document details of plants and trees, and that was exactly what Nirupa’s talent could provide. Together they documented 30 remarkable species of trees, with seeds, flowers, roots, in every little detail. This amazing book called ‘Pillars of Life’ hit the bookstores early August 2018.
Drawing trees is a long process. Nirupa and Divya first visit the individual trees around Coimbatore to study them in person. “I do a black-and-white sketch of the tree and take a few photos to aid my memory. When I’m back in Bangalore, I paint it. Divya then checks it for scientific accuracy.”
When an entire tree has to be observed, one may have to stand in strange places, explains Nirupa. For example, the perfect vantage point could be right next to an electric fence. Often there’s another tree in the way. Some trees are so huge, that after finishing observing the roots, one has to go two hairpin-bends up the road to study its canopy. “Leeches also make guest appearances,” says Nirupa of the small hazards of the job.
In 2017, Nirupa became one of National Geographic’s Young Explorers and received a grant to work on a book about the enchanting world of plants of the southern Western Ghats. This illustrated book, which is in progress, is a collaboration between her, botanist Siddarth Machado, writer Suniti Rao, and photographer Prasenjeet Yadav. It is particularly aimed at getting children interested in the wonders of plant life. It will display the amazing variety of flora in the Western Ghats, from the crazy, wild, and peculiar, to the most familiar plants of the region.
Nirupa’s work is not limited to assisting scientific documentation. She has also been inspired to do botanical illustrations for a fashion line. Once her current projects are finished, she plans to expand her sphere to draw plants from other Indian ecosystems besides the Western Ghats.
For more illustrations, visit Nirupa Rao’s website: www.nirupa-rao.com
About the contributor
Nanditha Chandraprakash
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