STORY BEHIND THE ART OF JEAN EMMONS
24th Annual International
American Society of Botanical Artists and Marin Art and Garden Center
Shadowed Moon Iris
Iris 'Shadowed Moon'
Every year, in early summer, we make a four-hour pilgrimage south to the Willamette Valley. East of Salem, Oregon, the Willamette Valley is famous for its mineral-rich, alluvial topsoil. Wonderful agricultural crops are produced there, including hazelnuts, hops, and pinot noir grapes. Also, irises!
We head to Schreiners Iris Gardens. For almost 100 years, the Schreiner family has been hybridizing beautiful irises, particularly blue, dark purple and black bearded irises of all heights and classes. We wander a ten-acre display garden with a back drop of 100 acres of commercial iris fields. Hundreds of different cultivars blooming all at once make for a dazzling array. Who needs Disneyland? Eyepopping colors, patterns, and textures abound. Plicatas, amoenas, bitones, and neglectas, the variations are endless. I ask myself which ones am I drawn to? It’s always the bicolors, the browns, the blacks, the yellow ochres. These colors are not usually associated with flowers.
How hard is it to find any flower in yellow ochre? Maybe a few roses, achilleas, orchids and some dahlias. Yellow ochre is a mixture of green and orange. A neutral, it’s quite malleable, often shifting between warm and cool depending on what it’s next to. However, it makes every color near it look good, especially green.
‘Shadowed Moon’ has variations of gold, buff, and yellow ochre with undertones of smokey chartreuse and brown. Purple veining and burnt Sienna on the hafts, bright orange beards. In the ‘Shadowed Moon’ entry in the Schreiner catalog, they talk of lunar eclipses and Bengal tigers sliding through a shadowy jungle.
From Schreiners, I buy only the 6 to 8 tubers that most appeal to me. It’s always a tough decision, as I don’t have much sunny deer-proof space. My garden is the home of a robust gang of Columbian black-tailed deer. Deer are not supposed to like to eat iris, but these deer don’t seem to remember this. They chomp down when the first flowers open, then spit them out on the ground, leaving me with beheaded iris stems. I shouldn’t be surprised – this gang has been spotted chowing down on western poison oak.
Irises are well-structured for their pollinators. The upright iris “standards” wave a flag to the bumblebees who then land on the downward facing “falls.” The falls have a caterpillar-like beard for the bees to grab onto, in order not to “fall” off. The flowers are big enough for a bee to shelter and take a nap in, which they do like to do. I could watch them for hours. I wonder what the irises look like to the bees in ultra violet light?
What could be better than growing iris to paint? Maybe, some cool weather to help them last a little longer. When I begin to paint, I’m immersed in a cloud of fragrance. To me, ‘Shadowed Moon’ smells like concord grapes with a little anise and mint.
I happily lose myself for many hours painting the tiny folds and flares of the standards, styles, and falls. In the past, I enjoyed painting still lifes of fabric. This is not very different. Shimmery colors remind me of Thai silk. As I move my head a fraction, colors shift, and I see more…
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Read more about this artist's work: Wildly Exquisite