Camellia sasanqua 'Leslie Ann'

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.

She is, despite the species name, an American plant. 'Leslie Ann' began as a chance seedling raised by Ray Davis of Mobile, Alabama, and first bloomed in 1954. Mobile is the right birthplace for her: the city has grown camellias since a single plant arrived from Liverpool in 1838, and more than a century later that obsession was still throwing seedlings worth naming. Davis grew his out, watched the first flowers open, and recognized what most chance seedlings never earn, a reason to keep going.

What he kept is a flower that resists being called simply pink or white. The bloom opens as a tight rosette and unfurls gradually to three and a half or four inches across, white washed with rose and finished at the petal edges in a fine lavender-pink line, around a center of yellow stamens. The edging reads almost like a picotee, drawn rather than brushed. An unusual lasting quality holds each bloom close to two weeks, with a few petals twisting as they age, so an established plant in full October bloom carries a layered, slightly windblown look rather than a flat uniform one.

The habit is the quiet surprise. Where most sasanquas read as dense shrubs, 'Leslie Ann' grows open and upright, and gardeners who know her keep reaching for the same comparison: the Juniper Level Botanic Garden likens the plant to a flowering cherry far more than a camellia. That openness earns a use a stiffer shrub cannot, a narrow profile for a tight space, a candidate for espalier against a warm wall, or simply a specimen given room to throw her branches. She blooms when most of the garden has finished, from mid-fall into early winter, and does it on the year's old wood without fuss.