Dramatic events and natural phenomena have a habit of changing the course of Turkish botanical artist Işik Güner’s life. Her future in environmental engineering, for one, was determinedly halted when she bunked off a master’s exam in favour of a solar eclipse.
The call of the wild had been tugging at Işik since childhood, when she would accompany her father, Professor Adil Güner, the retired director of the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanic Garden, on field trips. She recalls climbing mountains in flip-flops as a six-year-old and changing the paper between his herbarium sheets, so the specimens stayed dry on expeditions into remote habitats. Adil later encouraged his art-mad daughter to take a course with Christabel King, the chief botanical artist at Kew Gardens.
Environmental engineering never really stood a chance. Işik went on to become a nomadic artist. Much of her work has been in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, where she teaches, having contributed to its 2022 book Plants from the Woods and Forests of Chile, and to a long-term project to identify and conserve the flora of Nepal. Similarly, her input for The Beauty of Orchids exhibition at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China was, like all her work, laced with the impetus to preserve critical or endangered wild spaces and species. The venture closest to her heart, however, is the Illustrated Flora of Turkey, an ambitious, multi-platform project of which she is art editor. The aim is to illustrate and publish every known plant species in Turkey – in Turkish – across 28 volumes, which will include a cumulative 2,000 watercolour plates and 9,000 line drawings produced by Işik and her team (they are currently compiling volume 17). Işik’s whimsical home and studio is the base for this undertaking, a schedule of ceaseless travel occasionally halted by putting down roots in the Pontic mountains, where she spent summers as a child.
It is hard to believe that every panel, beam and floorboard, each scalloped arch door frame, hammered hinge and handle of the place, formerly her grandmother’s home, was dismantled and stored while a new floor was added beneath. These smoke-stained chestnut timbers, the colour of local mulberry molasses, still bear their chalk-mark numerals for reassembly, alongside several heart-encased carvings of Işik and her sister’s names, gouged by knife during their teenage years. Dexterity with scalpels remains a feature of the owner’s work life; she dissects each plant to study its morphological structure, fitting it together from the outside in so she can discern weight and texture, feel if it is woody or fleshy, crystalline or matt. A lifetime of looking at plants in their natural habitat is miraculously channelled on to paper in depictions that strike to the heart and soul of her subject. Işik is meticulous about honouring the plant’s exact dimensions, but like all great portrait artists, her work goes deeper than mere likeness. Recently, she made a dramatic play with scale for an exhibition titled Habitat in nearby Çamlıhemşin, where she created human-sized plant illustrations to conjure anthropomorphic empathy for endangered species.
Işik lives with the unfathomable riches of the Turkish flora all around her. Her fairytale hut is perched on a vertiginous valley in a tea-growing region in north-eastern Turkey, closer to Tbilisi and Tabriz than Istanbul or Ankara. In this landscape of high-peaked granite mountains clad in inky black-green Caucasian fir and spruce, the weather changes as fast as the flow of the Fırtına river, which can be heard over the electrifying dawn chorus and the muezzin’s call to prayer. This ‘storm river’ is an ever-broiling spate of mineral-rich glacial melt that rises in the peaks of the Kaçkar mountains and crashes into the Black Sea near Rize. The area has a contrary climate: exotica such as bananas brave metres of deep snow, while cloud cover comes and goes, from wispy veils to white-out to clear alpine skies at the turn of your back. Hallucinatory fresh greens of beech, hazel and walnut emerge in spring, teas of dried nettle and lime blossom, blueberry leaf and hand-plucked brews echo the local flora, as does the startling chestnut honey, grainy and medicinal, and jams from the fat corymbs of elderflower, Caucasian blueberries and cultivated rose.
When I visit, the roadside nearby is carpeted with the mauve confetti of Rhododendron ponticum and its understorey of Omphalodes cappadocica and Campanula persicifolia. Işik doesn’t need to venture more than a few metres to be engulfed in exhilarating subject matter. But venturing is still in her blood – and that of her sister Basak, who leads botanical tours around the world with her husband, the plant expert Chris Gardner.
During our visit, Işik offers to show photographer Ngoc and me the crown imperials we have been photographing at her studio in their native habitat – and so we go on a road trip. The sisters’ telephone banter is a mixture of Turkish, botanical Latin and GPS locations as they work out the best spots for sighting rarities such as the diminutive Fritillaria alburyana. I could fill an encyclopaedia with the floral bounty we see as a result: gulleys of peonies, fields of foxtail lilies, plains dotted with Oncocyclus irises, vertical sandy banks of Tchihatchewia isatidea and acres – yes, acres – of pristine crown imperials. Just how Işik likes to scrutinise them, to sketch, press, collect and absorb. Copious notes are taken and colour observations made.
We are in the Munzur valley. Ringed by snow-capped limestone mountains, it is one of the most biodiverse landscapes in Turkey, pristine in part thanks to its historical inhabitants, the nature-loving Anatolian Alevis. Arising from each fissure on one particular hillside, spaced so you can just walk between them, an immaculate crown imperial is in full, heady flower. From seedlings to majestic metre-high adults, each one is dripping with globules of sugary nectar and emitting clouds of scent. Sitting studiously among the flowers, ready to document them for posterity, art and science, is Işik Güner.
To discover more about Işik Güner’s projects, including ‘The Illustrated Flora of Turkey’, visit isikguner.com
A version of this article also appears in the July 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
