Story behind the art of Gillian Rice

28th Annual International

American Society of Botanical Artists and Marin Art & Garden Center

Palo Blanco

Mariosousa heterophylla

At an ASBA annual conference several years ago, as I sat in a Beyond Accuracy session listening to experts show and critique botanical artworks, a stunning painting of rainbow eucalyptus caught my attention. The artist who painted it was the late Lizzie Sanders, my hero who taught me drybrush and saved me from the watercolor washes I could never do. I adored Lizzie’s painting because it was so unusual – her composition took the bark to the edges of the paper in all directions. An accurate botanical work that looked like an abstract painting. But nature chose those magical colors, carefully reproduced by Lizzie.

From that day I began to look at trees in different ways. I became obsessed with the colors and textures of bark. I knew I could never match Lizzie’s accomplishments, but I did want to try a bark painting. On weekly visits to the Desert Botanical Garden near my home in Phoenix in the Sonoran Desert, I studied the trees and hunted for unusual bark.

The tree I chose was palo blanco, a native of the Sonoran Desert. The legume species is endemic to the state of Sonora, Mexico, but it’s a common landscape tree in the Phoenix metropolitan area. About 16-30 feet tall (five to nine meters), it likes sunny, warm locations and needs little water. In the wild, its habitat is rocky hills, with an arid to semi-arid climate and rain mainly in the warm season. Frost can damage palo blanco as it is hardy only to low temperatures of about 25F (or minus 4C), but Phoenix winters are mild and, with climate change, are becoming warmer.

Palo blanco is Spanish for “white stick.” I love this tree’s peeling, splitting bark: it has such character. The creamy-beige bark unwraps in all directions, revealing pale white or silvery blue smoothness. Patterns from the bark transfer to the smooth layer beneath. Darker knotty portions of my subject’s trunk remain where I assume it had been pruned. Very little pruning is necessary, however, as the tree tends to grow straight with minimal branches. This characteristic made the slender tree valuable to the Indigenous people of northern Mexico who used it for building material.

I painted my subject using a drybrush technique in watercolor on paper. I was able to sketch and color-match on many visits to the botanical garden and I also took photographs for reference.

I enjoy painting the plants that grow around me in the Sonoran Desert and try to focus on native species. While palo blanco’s natural range does not extend to my location in Arizona, it is still a Sonoran Desert native.

I hope that people viewing my artwork will join me in feeling the mystery and unpredictability in the exfoliating bark. I also hope that people find the colors intriguing. I remain thankful to Lizzie for being a superb instructor and for setting me on a tree bark journey.

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Read more about this artist's work: BAWW 2025