Camellia japonica 'Kujaku Tsubaki'

The name means peacock camellia, and the vanity here is all in the foliage. Long, narrow leaves with peculiar fishtailed tips drape from the branches in a pronounced weeping habit, more willow than camellia, more Japanese woodblock print than Southern border. This is not the camellia a grandmother grew.

Most japonica cultivars spend their lives chasing the perfect bloom. 'Kujaku Tsubaki' went a different way. Originating in Mikawa, in Aichi Prefecture, and documented in Camellia Cultivars of Japan as early as 1966, the plant belongs to a small lineage of Japanese selections grown as much for architectural habit and leaf as for flower. Where most camellias stand dense and upright, this one arches and trails, the foliage suggestive of a Salix or a peach in full leaf, the kind of plant a visitor stops to identify before noticing the flowers at all. The narrow leaves often carry faint yellow markings from a benign, long-established virus, part of the peacock effect.

When the flowers do come, they are tubular and deeply red, the petals splashed with irregular white, restrained and almost demure against the extravagance of everything else on the plant. They hang pendulous from the branches, never upright.

Growth is slow, a direct consequence of that weeping habit, but given time 'Kujaku Tsubaki' can reach small-tree proportions. This is a camellia for the gardener willing to wait, and patient enough to have grown past needing the flower to do all the work.