'Tama no ura' is among the most celebrated of all wild-found camellias, and the story is part of the plant. In 1947 a charcoal worker came upon a single old Camellia japonica, by repute some two hundred years old, growing deep in the forest near Tamanoura on Fukue Island in the Goto archipelago, off Nagasaki. The flowers stopped him: single, bright red, and edged crisply in white, a clean picotee never before recorded in the wild. Selected and propagated from that one tree, the camellia was exhibited in Nagasaki in 1973 and carried to America by Nuccio's Nursery in 1975.
Camellia 'Brian' is a handsome evergreen with showy, cyclamen-pink, semi-double flowers carried over a faint silvery cast, opening in late winter on a compact, upright frame. As best the nursery can determine, the plant is a Camellia reticulata by Camellia japonica hybrid, drawing the larger flower and silvered sheen of the reticulata side together with the hardiness and tidy habit of the japonicas.
Most American gardeners know two camellias, the winter-blooming Camellia japonica and the autumn-blooming Camellia sasanqua, each in a hundred named forms. Camellia longicarpa belongs to a different and far less familiar company: the small-flowered wild camellias of section Theopsis, scarcely grown on this side of the Pacific. Woodlanders remains one of the few nurseries offering these lesser-known species to gardeners who want the wild plant rather than the show cultivar.
Fragrance is the rarest thing in a camellia, and Camellia lutchuensis is the great exception, a species grown less for the size of the flower than for the scent that rises from it. The blooms are small, single, and white around a center of yellow stamens, carried in profusion on a twiggy, airy shrub, and they release a sweet, sometimes spicy perfume unusual in a genus famous for having almost none.
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.
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.
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.
'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
Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen' is the trumpet vine at its most garden-worthy, a vigorous deciduous climber hung all summer with clusters of big, flaring, orange to salmon-red trumpets. The vine is a hybrid between the American trumpet creeper, Campsis radicans, and the Chinese Campsis grandiflora, combining the toughness of one parent with the refinement of the other. Raised in the nineteenth century by the Tagliabue brothers at their nursery near Milan, 'Madame Galen' has remained the favorite form of the cross ever since.
Woodlanders collected this one in the pre-Andean foothills of northwest Argentina, which is exactly what the name says: praeandinum, before the Andes. The plant grows wild there between three and five thousand feet, in country that bakes by day and chills hard at night, and that upbringing shows. Heat that flattens lesser things does not faze this vine, which still comes back through a Zone 8 winter.
Carpinus caroliniana is a native tree that hides its best feature in plain sight, a smooth, gray, sinewy bark that ripples over the trunk like the muscles of a flexed arm, giving the common names musclewood and ironwood. This small, slow, dense understory tree of eastern North America carries fine, birch-like leaves and a rounded, layered crown. The wood beneath that muscled bark is famously hard and heavy, the reason ironwood stuck as a name.
Carya aquatica, the water hickory or bitter pecan, is a large native tree of the walnut family, reaching ninety feet and more in the wild. Across the American South the species dominates clay flats and the backwater ground near streams and rivers, reproducing aggressively by seed and by sprouts from roots and cut stumps, and forming a major part of the region's wetland forests, in part because the more marketable timber trees around the water hickory have so often been logged out.
Carya ovata, the shagbark hickory, is one of the great native trees of the eastern woods, as easy to know by the bark as by the nuts. Mature trunks shed long, gray plates that curl away at the ends and hang loose, giving the tree a genuinely shaggy silhouette against a winter sky. Beneath that ragged coat stands a tall, straight, long-lived hardwood that can shade a landscape for two centuries and more.
Native to Central and South America but naturalized across the tropics, this fast-growing shrub flowers not in spring or summer like a well-behaved plant but in autumn and into early winter, hanging great loose clusters of clear, saturated yellow at the ends of arching branches, each bloom built around curved stamens that give a vaguely butterfly-like silhouette. Cloudless Sulphur and Sleepy Orange butterflies find the shrub irresistible as both nectar source and larval host, and tend to arrive in numbers when the flowers open, a fact that either delights or mildly alarms a gardener, depending on how attached one is to the foliage. The caterpillars, for the record, are a vivid chartreuse and genuinely handsome. That is the bargain on offer.
'Buttercream' is a pale yellow-flowered form of Cassia bicapsularis, a softer, more refined take on that shrub's late-season show. Where the species blazes a saturated gold, 'Buttercream' carries clusters of cool, buttery cream-yellow flowers through autumn and into early winter, the same butterfly-like blooms at the ends of fast, arching branches, and the same draw for Cloudless Sulphur and Sleepy Orange butterflies that feed and breed on the plant.
September is a difficult month to write for. The garden is still technically in summer, but the light has shifted, lower and more golden, arriving at an angle that changes everything it touches. Cassia corymbosa reads that shift and answers it. While most summer shrubs are winding down, this one is only beginning, throwing dense corymbs of deep golden-yellow flowers at the branch tips with an enthusiasm that seems almost contrarian for the season.
Few trees carry as much historical weight as the chestnuts, and Castanea mollissima carries it gracefully. This handsome, wide-spreading Chinese native stepped into the void left by one of the great ecological tragedies of the twentieth century, the near-total collapse of the American chestnut, and has been feeding people, wildlife, and the soil ever since. Come fall, the spiny husks crack open to reveal some of the largest, sweetest chestnuts a gardener can grow.
