RE: Camelia

Hi Tim,

Where I live is much like southern California, and like CA we have many
very old plants around 150 yrs old that make quite respectable trees in
many old gardens in the Adelaide Hills and the gullies that lead onto
the Adelaide Plains. Most of these exist on whatever rain falls from the
sky and that's all.

I grow about 100 camellias and have tried a good many more.

The lack of humidity in the air over summer makes growing some of the
new 'yellow' kinds and species very difficult - in fact they never
really look good as the soft sub-tropical foliage is always ratty and
burned unless grown under shade cloth - and who wants that as a dominant
garden feature?

Even so many of the small flowered white species do very well and make
handsome shrubs. Camellia grijsii is my favourite, but lutchuensis and
yushuensis are also excellent, especially if you can acquire some of the
selected cultivars which have much heavier flower clusters than others.

The old single kinds are good because they drop their flowers when they
are finished. There's nothing worse than a double camellia covered in
dead brown flowers for 6 months after flowering. I guess its fine to
pull them off if you have a small bush but try it on a 150 yr old tree
20ft high and covered with thousands of dead blooms. The ancient Higo
strain has many beautiful cultivars and all are worth collecting, if
collecting is your bag. There are also some very old dwarf semi-double
forms called 'wabisuke' that are well worth a place in a garden.
Traditionally these are the camellias that grace the gardens ouitside
Tea ceremony houses.

Don't forget there are several varieties that develop very impressive
fruits - the size of small green apples; these can be attractive as
garden plants too having more than one season of interest, and being
useful for picking and bringing indoors.

Finally there are kinds which have unusual foliage - the reticulate
foliage of the reticulata group, the fiish tail foliage group - KINGYO
TSUBAKI, the ruffled folaige of the Elegans group, and the willow
foliage group, and also those kinds that have pendulous growth. A plant
of RED WILLOW in my garden is nearly 15ft high and is strongly pendulous
- I trained it up a pole for about 10 yrs before it made an upright main
trunk strong enough to support the falling branches that sweep to the
ground. There is another weeping kind too with red and white blotched
flowers shaped like a shuttle-cock. I cannot now recall its Japanese
name.

I am pretty sure that somewhere in CA there must be nurseries that deal
in such interesting kinds, maybe even Nuccio's.

regards

trevor n
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