MRS JEAN STEVENS nee Emily Jean Burgess

Iris-lovers throughout the world have suffered a grievous loss by the sudden death on 8th August 1967 of Mrs Jean Stevens.
....The name is known to all horticulturalists, not only for the vast collection of Australian, South African, and New Zealand shrubs and plants which arc grown at Wanganui, but for the irises which Jean Stevens loved, grew, and hybridized for so many years.
....Many of her productions are well known; YOUTHFUL CHARM, OPAL SHEEN, BRILLIANT SUNRISE, and the more recent SUNSET SNOWS which this year won third place in the Florence trials as well as the Coppa Garden Club di Firenze (for original colour) and the Coppa Piaggio (for the best early-flowering variety). But perhaps best known of all is her earlier PINNACLE.
....Jean Stevens' chief interest was in hybridizing the tall bearded irises, a project started in 1923 and which she continued to the end, despite poor health. She was always trying for new colours, and especially in recent years was working to produce better pink amoenas---a very difficult class, in which her SUNSET SNOWS is right in the forefront.
Following her visits to the U.S.A. in 1956 and 1960 she returned full of enthusiasm for Paul Cook's PROGENITOR derivatives, at that time little known over here, and she produced numerous seedlings from this line, the latest being TWILIGHT HARMONY with yellow standards and heliotrope falls.
....So well known was the garden at Wanganui, that the Queen Mother expressed a wish to see it when she was in New Zealand in 1966, and was shown round by Jean Stevens.
....Mrs Stevens was a life member of the B.I.S. and A.I.S. She was awarded the Foster Plaque in 1953 and the Hybridizer's Medal in 1955. Not only was she author of the well-known book The Iris and its Culture, invaluable to growers in the southern hemisphere, but scarcely a N.Z.I. S. Bulletin appeared without one or more articles by this prolific writer. Twice President of the N.Z.J.S., Editor of their Bulletin for some six years, and Registrar for the N.Z.-raised irises for very many years, her passing will be a very serious loss to that Society. As a regular recipient of her long and interesting letters and of rhizomes of her newest cultivars, which she gave so generously to those interested, the writer feels a very personal loss with the passing of this great
iris personality. L.W.B.