Gerald Ernest Wickens was born
Marylebone in 1927 and attended
Ealing County High School. Following army service (1946–1948) he followed a career in agriculture and conservation in
Africa. He served in the Africa Agriculture Department from 1952 and joined Hunting Technical Services (1962–1966) in
Sudan where he was team leader and ecologist for a study of
Jebel Marra, an isolated massif. In 1967 he worked at the
Herbarium at
Kew Gardens, continuing to work on African plants, especially
Combretaceae,
Melastomataceae and
Crassulaceae. He was awarded a Ph.D. from
Reading University in 1972 for his theses "The Flora of Jebel Marra". In 1981 worked on the Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Tropics (SEPASAT). From 1983 he headed the Economic and Conservation Section of the Herbarium (ECOS), which included directing the cataloguing of the Economic Botany collection, rehousing from the museums to the Sir Joseph Banks building, digitisation of the Kew Economic Botany Bibliographic Database and also managing the Conservation Policy team including
CITES. He published over 120 scientific papers and is noted particularly for the
Flora of Jebel Marra (1976) and
The Baobabs (2008). He married his wife Susan (Mimi Stammers, b 1937), who worked in the Library at Kew, in
Richmond Catholic Church (1969) and had a son, David (b 1970). He retired in 1987 and moved to
Aylsham in Norfolk, where he died 2019 in
Cromer. == Selected publications ==