Uninhibited vegetation populated by matronly hens and self-important ducks surrounds the house of botanical artist Susan Sex, in north Co Dublin. Her husband's profession as a practitioner of Chinese medicine is elegantly proclaimed by calligraphic Oriental brush-strokes near the front door. In the back yard a number of covetable motor bikes and a bumper-to-bumper cluster of cars announce that one of her five sons is a motor mechanic.
It is evidently a busy, creative household. Inside, the walls are interestingly embellished with paintings, drawings, photographs, theatre posters (publicising her actor father and sister) and richly-inked etchings by a print-making son and daughter.
An elderly bull terrier sleeps deeply on a square cushion under the big kitchen table, barrel nose pressed firmly against the radiator. The occasional old-dog sigh escapes from her pink-and-white head into the Aga-warmed air. She is oblivious to everything, including the several shockingly-beautiful, full-flowered orchids on the table above. Her owner, however, is acutely sensitive to every petal, stem, leaf and microscopic hair, and the exact shade, flush and line of colour in their waxy, swollen blooms.
The tropical stunners are arrogantly handsome, and will keep Susan Sex's pencil and brush occupied for a while, until the first of the Irish orchids appears - some on the nearby sand-hills and marshy hollows of Portmarnock. The little natives, with their barely-there flowers, have lately exercised a mesmeric fascination over Susan. Her concentration is absolute: "When I am painting, I don't feel any pain, I don't feel any tiredness, I don't feel any hunger," she says. "But when I get up," she adds, "I'm like a woman of 90."
Her detailed watercolours - where every turn of blemished leaf and pattern of intricate petal is millimetre-perfect - may take a week to complete, in the precious hours snatched while managing a large family. She works, with a strap-on magnifying visor, and sometimes a microscope, in the bright bedroom. Here the light is just right, "falling from the left and above". Husband Vincent is stoic about the pieces of MDF hardboard (temporary backing for work in progress) that make a shin-barking obstacle course around the room.
Her work is not just breathtakingly delicate; it is an important record of endangered plants. Orchids are "a tale of disappearing plants. Tropical orchids are vanishing" through loss of habitat and unlawful collection. "And at home, Irish orchids are disappearing through land-drainage, building, use of fertilisers," she says. "Native orchids love unimproved pasture more than anything else. And pockets of neglect, that's what they like, as in golf courses and dune chains."
Last summer, Susan found a private sponsor whose generosity allowed her to devote herself to an elaborate series of native orchids without having to sell any of the resulting, exquisitely-observed works. "They're as finely finished as I know how." Among them are portraits of "the rarest orchid in Ireland, maybe" - the Threefold Lady's Tresses (Spiranthes romanzoffiana), with whitish flowers arranged in three spirals up the stem; and the rare Narrow-leaved Helleborine (Cephalanthera longifolia) with white, vase-shaped blooms.
Encouraged by veteran painter, Wendy Walsh ("she and Raymond Piper are the twin peaks of Irish botanical art"), and the orchid-keeper at the Botanic Gardens, Brendan Sayers, Susan submitted her eight best studies to the prestigious Royal Horticultural Society's January exhibition in London. She won a gold medal ("for a consistent standard of excellence over eight paintings"), one of very few ever awarded to Irish painters.
Last month at the annual RHS Orchid Show in London, Susan collaborated with the National Botanic Gardens on a display depicting orchid hunters, past and present. Her contribution was of tropical orchids depicted on artificially distressed and aged paper. The tobacco-coloured stains, splatters and dribbles look as if the pictures have witnessed muggy heat, torrential rain and perhaps the odd bit of malaria and dengue fever. "I think it's a fantastic effect," she says with satisfaction. A leading orchid painter, however, did not agree when he spotted them at the show: "What have you done to your pictures?" he blustered in horror. The RHS, on the other hand, responded by awarding a silver-gilt medal to the Irish stand.
Susan's first orchid was painted 20 years ago: "It was growing on top of a stone wall beside the Blackwater in Youghal". It was Orchis mascula (Early Purple Orchid), although I didn't know it then." Her next was 15 years later, "a little Masdevallia brought home from the Botanic Gardens." Over the following 18 months she painted 32 - some of which, with the blessing of the gardens' director, Donal Synnott, were exhibited in the new Herbarium building in 1997.
It is worth noting that this is a woman who, before the orchids took over her life, was a "keen gardener". But only of sensible vegetables: "I grew all the vegetables you could name, but I wasn't into flowers. I thought they were a bit useless!"
jpowers@irish-times.ie