Jean Emmons is tired of painting pretty flowers. 

Don’t be mistaken. The 58-year-old botanical artist can paint flowers artfully and accurately like few can. She has exhibited her paintings at Kew Gardens in London, the New York Botanical Gardens, even the Smithsonian. Her 2005 series of Pacific Coast irises won a gold medal in the Royal Horticulture Society’s Botanical Painting Exhibition in London — the highest honor a botanical artist can earn. 

Since then, though, Emmons, who has spent more than 20 years creating simple but strikingly detailed illustrations of flowers, vegetables and fruit of every kind, has been looking for new challenges.

Standing in her well-kept yard one rainy afternoon, Emmons, dressed in simple Northwest garb with her red hair pulled back, held up pot after pot of her latest challenge: Arisaemas. More commonly known as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, the carnivorous plant with long, tubular blooms and stigmas protruding like tongues looks almost like something from a science fiction movie.

“Isn’t it weird?” she said happily. “I love the weird ones.”

Her passion for plants — from weird ones to 

beautiful ones, from gorgeous flowers to obscure vegetables — has been a driving force in both her artistic and personal life for years. Indeed, this soft-spoken woman, while humble about her achievements, is quick to open up about her passion for spending hours on end painting the creases of flower petals or the subtle spectrum of colors reflected in an eggplant.

Inside her home near Dilworth Point, surrounded by walls covered with the work of artists she admires, Emmons sipped tea and talked about botanical painting. 

Unlike some botanical artists, she prefers to work with the actual plants in front of her, not photographs.

“I get more information from the real plant,” she said, touching a white flower in a vase in front of her, “Our vision works differently than the camera’s vision.”

This spring Emmons stepped outside the box with her second entry in the Royal Horticulture Society’s exhibition: She chose to paint mushrooms.

“There’s such variety of forms and colors and textures,” she said.

Not only is Emmons lucky to live in a place with such ready access to plants, but she unknowingly chose the perfect time to begin painting mushrooms. The fungi have thrived during the wetter-than-normal autumns on Vashon, and for the past three seasons Emmons has foraged with Carole Elder, a friend and amateur botanist who knows the best spots on the Island to find mushrooms. 

“I told her I didn’t want to eat them. I just want one attractive one to paint,” Emmons said, laughing. 

Coincidentally, as Emmons found the perfect specimens and went to work in her studio overlooking the woods, the Royal Horticulture Society began to reconsider whether mushrooms — technically fungi and not plants — could be entered in the show.

“I heard rumors that they weren’t going to allow them,” Emmons said. “I got worried.”

To make matters worse, Emmons developed an allergy to mushroom spores from spending so much time working near the fungi. One of her favorite mushrooms, the amanita — recognizably red with white spots — was the worst.

“I was starting to lose my balance from breathing them,” she said.

Emmons pushed forward, though, wearing a medical mask around the mushrooms. She sometimes spent 12 hours a day painting layer upon layer of detail and took exercise classes in her spare time to ease the neck pain that resulted.

“It’s not a field that appeals to a lot of people,” Emmons said. “You have to like to stare at the same object for several hours. But I love it.”

Emmons hasn’t always worked with such detail. Attending art school in the 1970s at Syracuse University and then the University of Massachusetts, she painted large, abstract pieces that were popular at the time.  

“Nobody taught realistic drawing or painting,” Emmons explained. “If you did realism you’d flunk.”

Once in her 30s and a professional artist, Emmons became more and more interested in plants and grew into an avid gardener. Eventually, the garden clubs she was involved with began asking for her help making posters for plant sales. 

“They started out as simple borders,” she said, “and from there become more elaborate and more elaborate.”

Before she knew it, Emmons found herself in demand as an illustrator of flowers, fruits and vegetables for books and magazines around the country. She often worked on tight deadlines and sometimes through the night in order to mail out her illustration the next morning.

But the field of botanical art has evolved, Emmons said, and so has she. The American Society of Botanical Artists, which she joined at its inception in 1994 with 35 other artists, now has more than 1,500 members.

Gone are Emmons’ days of freelance illustrating. Though she sometimes works on commission, she now largely chooses her own subjects. “All I do is sell paintings now, which is great,” she said.

Still, she credits her years of working on deadlines with giving her an edge over other botanical artists. 

That efficiency, she said, may be what allowed her to create the dozen paintings of Northwest mushrooms that she entered in the Royal Horticulture Society’s show — more than the required eight. 

Ultimately, the horticulture society allowed fungi to be part of the show. And in March, her series of 12 paintings of common Northwest mushrooms won a gold medal at the exhibition, her second one.

“I was happy,” Emmons said of her accomplishment. “Just because you win a gold once doesn’t mean you’ll win it again.”

Emmons’ friend Elder, who helped her collect the mushrooms, was more eager to praise the mushroom series, saying she wasn’t surprised at all when they earned Emmons another gold. 

“It was giving me cold chills. …  It was really great,” she said of Emmons’ work.

Elder, who also studied art in college, said the paintings are not only beautiful, but scientifically accurate. 

“I’m not a botanist, but I know they’re very accurate,” she said.

The centerpiece painting, a scene of several varieties of mushrooms growing around the base of a tree, took Emmons five months to complete and sold for $11,000. Emmons has to sell her work, she said, simply because of the amount of time she puts into it.

Now, Emmons said, she’s taking some much-needed time off.

“In the fall I was working 12 hours a day on those things, and now I’m kind of fried.”

When she does start painting again, though, she’ll continue her latest challenge of carnivorous plants. And, maybe, some flowers. 

“I think I’m going to go back to pretty flowers for a while,” she said, “have some color in my life.”

To see Emmons’ work, visit www.jeanemmons.com. Prints of her prize-winning mushroom series will be on display at the Heron’s Nest in August.