Winter is here: Sixteen hours of rain turned to snow yesterday morning, heavy snow that continued for just about twenty-four hours straight. This morning, I awakened to a world entirely white, earth and sky the same color, mountains completely hidden by the wall of snow coming down. Were it not for the trees and the bits of fencing and buildings her on the land, it would have been entirely disorienting, with no horizon line to delineate the threshold between sky and soil.
It’s largely sunny now, save for the peaks themselves, but the winds are due to move in; tonight the mercury will likely drop to single digits, and the snow — a good eighteen inches in some places here, not from drifting but from the variable movement in the storm line — will turn to ice.
In light of the current cold, it seems a welcome thing to return to the warm earthy hues we explored here yesterday: rich red-brown clay touched gently by the morning sun, turning it a delicate pink. Today’s featured gemstone manifests in similar shades, but also appears almost a living thing, bright blossoms in scarlet and mulberry atop gray-brown stalks seeming to bloom directly on its surface.
It’s red flower jasper.
It goes by other names, too, depending on the region, particularly: Some in the field refer to it simply as “flower jasper”; others as “Chinese flower jasper”; and still others as “Owyhee flower jasper,” a variant of a particular subcategory of the stone, Owyhee jasper, found only in one place on this continent. I suspect that all are accurate, at least in a superficial sense, but “red flower jasper” seems to be the most widely accepted and applicable, as well as the most aptly descriptive, so that is the label we use.
Before we get into the similarities and differences between the various subcategories of red flower jasper, and between it and other members of the broader class known as the orbicular jaspers, I’m going to take a moment to reprise some of my earlier explanations of what jasper is:
[Jasper is] part of a much broader family tree: also a form of chalcedony, which is in turn a form of quartz, the earth’s second-most common mineral. Jasper is a cousin of chert, but where chert is functional, jasper tends to be frivolous. As I wrote here last year:
Jasper is a mineral in the quartz class; specifically, it’s a form of chalcedony. It is related to chert, a type of stone used by peoples ancient and not so ancient for knapping blades for use in tools and weapons.
Chert appears in plain form: an opaque substance with fairly uniform color, usually in a whitish, gray, or beige shade; it’s the sort of surface that one would tend to refer to as a “rock,” rather than a “stone.”
In its more colorful and variegated form, however, the same stone is known as “jasper,” and it comes in a dizzying array of patterns and hues. The most common shades range through the yellow-to-orange-to-red-to-brown section of the spectrum, followed by those in greenish shades of varying intensity (or lack thereof). Blues are more rare — rare in the sense that they are seldom found, not especially rare in terms of monetary value. Jasper also often appears with bold decorative patterns that occur naturally in the stone: spots and splotches; agate-like bands and plumes; matrices that create the appearance of landscape “pictures”; even dendrites, tiny fossilized once-living creatures. If you have a colorful banded or plumed stone and wondering whether it’s jasper or agate, hold it up to the light: If it’s translucent, it’s agate; if opaque, it’s jasper.
Jasper that is used in gemwork is stunningly diverse. Common varieties include bloodstone, a green so deep it is sometimes nearly blue, with a brick-red matrix that often appears in a drop-like pattern, hence the name; seafoam jasper, that usually appears in white or pastel shades, with round, puffy inclusions in a variety of colors that evoke the foam upon waves; and picture jasper, which is exactly what its name implies — a stone of wildly variable colors and matrices that appear to create their own picture, usually resembling a landscape.
Earlier this year, when we covered picture jasper specifically, I clarified some aspects of the stone’s crystal structure and appearance:
[J]asper [is] a form of microcrystalline quartz. Unlike other forms of those minerals, jasper is opaque. It’s virtually always multi-colored, and usually patterned, as well: Inclusions appear in the form of lines, waves, dots, swirls, orbs, clusters, and all sorts of geometric shapes. We’ve talked about jasper here before; some of it closely resembles agate, but it does not have agate’s translucence. And despite being part of the larger quartz family, it doesn’t appear in the sort of crystalline form common to ordinary quartz; its microcrystalline structure, much grainier, is what gives it its opacity. Jasper is found in all three types of rock — igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary — and it co-occurs with virtually every type of mineral, as well as some non-mineral materials such as coral and dendrites.
Within the larger category labeled “jasper,” there are a number of subclassifications that are broken down by the general pattern in which the stone manifests: breccia (breakages); lines; waves; orbs; etc. One of these subclasses is called orbicular jasper, for the round, spherical patterns in which the stone’s matrix appears.
Orbicular jasper is, most often, found in deposits of rhyolite (an igneous volcanic rock of the felsic variety, meaning that it has a high silica content) or of tuff (a type of soft rock formed from volcanic ash during the course of an eruption). Both provide host environments that induce the feldspar and quartz inclusions present to crystallize in the form of tiny needles arrayed in a radial pattern, which, on the surface, create the round “orbs” that are the mark of orbicular jasper.
Red flower jasper is only one variety of orbicular jasper. Perhaps the most commonly known, and one of the clearest examples of the type, is ocean jasper, which tends to manifest in shades of sea green (from pale seafoam to hunter and olive and teal shades) and pinkish tones ranging from pastel hues to mulberry and mauve, all against a white background. Another is polka-dot jasper, which we covered here a few weeks ago. Poppy jasper is a third variety, so named for the flowery orb-like patterns that appear in bright brick red on the often-yellow surface of the stone. There is a variant of poppy jasper that comes solely from the Morgan Hill district of Santa Clara County, in California; some in the field call it “Morgan Hill poppy jasper”; others, simply “Morgan Hill jasper.”
There is still another regional jasper variant that falls into this category, known as Owyhee jasper. It’s named for the Owyhee River, which flows from northern Nevada up to and along the Idaho/Oregon border. Along the border are a number of mines that yield varieties of jasper, agate, rhyolite, and other minerals, among them one particular variety of jasper that has come to be called Owyhee jasper. It tends to appear in light earthen tones ranging from ivory to light taupe to pale gray, with lines and bars and swatches in shades ranging from golden brown to umber and brick red. It looks like a form of picture jasper, and, indeed, some in the mineralogical and gemological fields explicitly refer to it as “Owyhee picture jasper.” However, there is another variant of this same stone, one more delicate in appearance, whose matrix exhibits roundish, blossom-like effects. This form is known as Owyhee flower jasper. [As a side note, the name is reportedly a U.S. colonial-era bastardization of the word Hawai’i, a product of charting expeditions that included Native Hawai’ian members.]
The Owyhee region is far from the only one to produce flower jasper, however. Versions of this type of orbicular jasper are found in places as far-flung as Asia, Madagascar, and the United States; It would not surprise me to learn that deposits exist across most other continents, as well. In Asia, China is one common source for it, but I rather suspect that the name “Chinese flower jasper” refers less to the country of origin and more to non-Asian perceptions of the stone’s pattern. Its matrix does often appear in shapes that greatly resemble the cherry- and plum-blossom patterns found in iconic styles of Asian art, and the muted pinks and purples and grays — ivory, taupe, gray, and even dusty rose backgrounds; “flowers” in magenta and mulberry and mauve and plum and blood red; “branches” and “stems” in taupe and charcoal and jet — are likewise common to some classic forms of Asian art. Given the colors of the cabochon pictured above, it’s tempting to think that the name “plum blossom jasper” would be fitting . . . but there actually is a jasper variant already named “plum blossom,” and it looks quite different from this type of orbicular jasper.
When it comes to symbolism putatively attached to the stone, it can get confusing: After all, it’s a variant of jasper, to which “crystal practitioners” impute all sorts of properties and powers, and they are not always delineated by variety. For those who do define the symbolism for jasper variants individually, red flower jasper seems mostly to be associated with “heart chakras,” with “love,” with”lifting spirits” and “healing broken hearts.”
For us, it’s simply one more in a very long line of beautiful lesser-known stones. Wings acquired this one, if memory serves, about four years or so ago. For a very long time, it sat in its proper case; for the last few months, it’s been on his workbench, awaiting just the right inspiration. It’s a large cabochon, one in an unusual cut, suitable for a large, bold cuff, pendant, or belt buckle. If it speaks to you, simply inquire via the Contact form at left; he can make something unique to your own spirit.
To me, it’s a beautiful example of Nature’s own artistic ability, one rendered in soft subtle shades that bespeak warmth and life. One a day this cold and snowy, that’s a welcome gift indeed.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
