Winter flower when the garden rests. The classic broadleaf evergreens of the South, camellias stay glossy year-round and bloom from autumn into spring, lighting the shaded places when color is scarce.
Three things to know about this camellia. First, the tea-oil camellia is the most economically important non-tea member of the genus. China has cultivated Camellia oleifera for over two thousand three hundred years for the oil pressed from the seeds, a light, sweetish, monounsaturated cooking oil chemically close to olive oil (around eighty percent oleic acid in both), used for cooking, traditional cosmetics, hair tonics, and the historic rust-proofing of Japanese woodworking tools and chef's knives. Tea oil sits with olive, palm, and coconut among the four major woody oil crops on Earth. This is a working tree.
Camellia rosaeflora is a graceful species camellia from China, one of the lesser-known kinds Woodlanders keeps in circulation for American gardeners. The habit is open and upright, the leaves small and fine for the genus, and in early spring the branches carry masses of small pink flowers, roughly an inch across and lightly double, in such profusion that the spent petals often fall to lay a soft pink carpet on the ground beneath.
Most camellias are bought for the flower. This one is bought for the leaf, and anyone who has met the plant in person understands why within about four seconds. Camellia salicifolia carries long, thin, lance-shaped leaves that hang rather than sit, closer to a willow or a bamboo than to the stiff glossy ovals of a japonica, so the whole shrub moves in a breeze and reads soft where the rest of the genus reads architectural. New growth comes out coppery and silky, covered in fine hairs, and the young branchlets are villous enough to feel like felt between the fingers. Some growers call the species the willow-leaf camellia and some the Hong Kong camellia; both names point at something true.
Camellia saluenensis is not the flashiest camellia in the garden, but few have done more to shape the ones that are. This upright, densely leafy evergreen carries small, single, funnel-shaped flowers in soft pink, opening from late winter into spring, and stands as one of the two parents behind the celebrated Camellia williamsii hybrids that carried camellia growing into colder gardens.
Two Hall of Fame inductions hang on Leslie Ann's lineage, though neither is for a flower. The award stamped on her record, the Ralph Peer Sasanqua Award, carries the name of the man who in 1923 hauled recording equipment south to Atlanta and captured the first commercial sides of country and blues. Ralph Peer pioneered field recording and sits in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame, then turned that same restless curatorial instinct on camellias late in life, founding the Los Angeles Camellia Society in 1948 and rising to president of the American Camellia Society by 1957. The man who recorded the Carter Family also decided which sasanquas deserved to be remembered. In 1961, one of them was this one.
'Misty Moon' is a relatively new selection of the favorite fall-blooming sasanqua, an upright, bushy evergreen carrying large, rounded, single to semi-double flowers in a soft lavender-pink with gently wavy petals. The fading flowers do something unusual, taking on a cool grayish-blue cast before the petals drop, the detail that earns the name. Woodlanders has grown 'Misty Moon' in the ground for many years here in Aiken, and the old-nursery specimen has become a real showstopper just as the rest of the garden winds down for the year.
'Yuletide' is one of the most widespread and instantly recognizable red camellias in the trade, and the popularity is well earned. Dense growth carries lustrous dark green foliage on an upright, tidy, naturally columnar frame, and against that backdrop the flowers arrive in real quantity from late fall into early winter: single blooms about three inches across in a clean fire red, each one centered on a boss of bright golden stamens. The contrast is the thing. Very few plants are doing anything at all in December in a southern garden, and a shrub covered in red and gold at that moment tends to end arguments about where to put it.
Camellia 'California Dawn' brings together two very different parents to make a large, generous flower for the far end of the year. A cross between the autumn-blooming Japanese Camellia sasanqua and the big, tender, large-flowered Camellia reticulata of Yunnan, this hybrid opens wide light-pink blooms, semi-double to loose peony form, the petals crimped and waved like crepe paper. The flowers arrive in fall and early winter, when the garden has mostly finished, and this camellia has grown and performed well in the Woodlanders garden.
This is the tea plant. Not a tea plant but the tea plant. Every cup of green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong, and pu-erh on Earth comes from a single species, Camellia sinensis. The differences in flavor and color come from the timing of the harvest and the way the leaves are handled afterward: green tea from the youngest leaves, briefly steamed; white tea from the unopened buds; black tea from fully oxidized older leaves; oolong from partial oxidation. One plant, many fates.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
'Rosea' is a pink-flowered form of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, the same species behind every cup of green, black, white, and oolong tea, here carrying soft pink flowers in place of the usual white and a reddish flush through the new foliage. The leaves still make tea, so this is an ornamental and a useful plant at once, a little prettier in flower than the straight species and just as willing in the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
4–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
Two species of camellia are commonly grown in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, and there are countless varieties of each. This plant is neither. 'Cinnamon Cindy' is a hybrid between Camellia japonica 'Kenyo-tai' and a Chinese species, Camellia lutchuensis, and the reason anyone made that cross is fragrance. C. lutchuensis is a small-flowered species from the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan carrying a scent that almost no garden camellia possesses, and breeders have spent decades trying to move that quality into plants with flowers worth looking at.
Camellia × williamsii 'Donation' is widely counted among the finest hybrid camellias ever raised, and a long-standing favorite in our own garden. The cross is between Camellia saluenensis and the old japonica 'Donckelaeri', made by Colonel Stephenson Clarke at Borde Hill in England; the williamsii group to which the plant belongs began with J.C. Williams at Caerhays, whose saluenensis crosses gave the genus a new hardiness and an unmatched freedom of bloom. 'Donation' carried that promise furthest, and the Royal Horticultural Society has long honored the plant with an Award of Garden Merit.
