[1][2] Gerald Ernest Wickens was born Marylebone in 1927 and attended Ealing County High School.
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.
[4] In 1981 worked on the Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Tropics (SEPASAT).
[6] 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).