Biography

Helen Faulkner, botanical collector and illustrator, is recognised for her contribution to tropical African botany.

She studied art and ballet in Paris before the outbreak of the First World War, and in 1921 married Major H.G. Faulkner. The couple lived at first in Tasmania, where Major Faulkner had a small farm, then in East Africa from 1924.

The Faulkners’ first home in Africa was in Tanga, Tanganyika (Tanzania), where Major Faulkner accepted a position managing sisal estates. They later moved to Benguela, Angola, where he was employed by Wigglesworth & Co. It was in Angola that Helen Faulkner was inspired to begin painting the rich flora, producing nearly 400 watercolours between 1937 and 1942. Here she also met the government botanist John Gossweiler, with whose encouragement she started to make herbarium collections.

In 1942 Major Faulkner was posted to plantations in the Zambezia province of Mozambique, where Helen began to actively collect, meanwhile corresponding with the National Herbarium in Pretoria, South Africa, and the Government Herbarium in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (Harare, Zimbabwe).

Faulkner visited the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in 1947, meeting Edgar Milne-Redhead, in charge of the African Section. She thereafter began to send generous consignments of plants to Kew from Mozambique, which contributed to the Flora Zambesiaca and Flora of Tropical East Africa projects.

The Faulkners were once more based in Tanganyika from 1950-1954, at Bushiri, Kange and Magunga. They remained in the country after Major Faulkner’s retirement in 1954, settling in Mwambeni. Helen Faulkner lived here for the rest of her life, apart from five years in Zanzibar (1959-1964).

She continued to make valuable collections of plants in her final years, especially from limestone and coral outcrops, and the diminishing coastal forest, whose destruction she lamented. In all she gathered about 5,000 plants, divided between Kew and Pretoria, with duplicates given to various herbaria in Africa and Europe. She died at her home in Mwambeni. He papers and paintings are held at Kew. She is commemorated in several species names, including Hibiscus faulknerae Vollesen and Uvaria faulknerae Verdc.

Sources:
R.M. Polhill 1980, "Helen Faulkner, 1888-1979", Kew Bulletin, 34(4):619-620.