Theaceae
47 plants in this collection
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![Camellia 'Jury's Yellow', white camellia with a boss of cream-yellow petaloids]()
![Single red Camellia japonica bloom on glossy dark foliage]()
![Camellia 'Crimson Candles', upright rose-pink winter bloom close-up]()
Camellia reticulata x fraterna 'Crimson Candles' $30.00 /Camellia, Crimson Candles
- Zones 7–10
- 8–10 ft
![Camellia saluensis 'Appleblossom', single apple-blossom-pink flowers on a bushy evergreen camellia.]()
![Camellia sinensis, tea plant, small fragrant white flower with yellow stamens]()
![Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha), white fragrant late-summer bloom and glossy foliage]()
![×Schimlinia 'Schima Lina Ding Dong' broadleaf evergreen hybrid shrub]()
![Camellia crapnelliana, Crapnell camellia in bloom, white flowers on a glossy evergreen]()
![Camellia edithae 'Heimudan', deep rose-red double bloom among thick furrowed leaves]()
![Camellia fraterna]()
![Camellia gigantocarpa foliage and large woody fruit, a rare species camellia]()
![Camellia granthamiana in bloom, enormous white flowers on a glossy evergreen tree]()
![Camellia 'Julia Mackintosh' sasanqua bloom, white ruffled petals with a pink-red basal cup]()
Camellia hybrid 'Julia Mackintosh' $23.00 /Sasanqua Camellia, 'Julia Mackintosh'
- Zones 8–9
- 10–12 ft
![Camellia japonica 'Anacostia' in bloom, red winter flower]()
![Camellia japonica 'Greensboro Red' bloom on glossy evergreen foliage]()
About the Theaceae Collection
Theaceae is the tea family, and the name is earned twice over. The plant that gives us the word, Camellia sinensis, is a member, and every cup of green, black, white, and oolong tea on earth is drawn from a single evergreen shrub in this family. Around that one economically vast species gathers a company of the most admired ornamentals in the temperate world, held together by a shared signature: bowl-shaped flowers built on five petals and a central boss of many stamens, carried on plants of glossy, substantial leaf.
The heart of the family, in gardens at least, is Camellia, named by Linnaeus for Georg Josef Kamel, the Moravian Jesuit who botanized in the Philippines at the close of the seventeenth century. The genus alone would fill a lifetime, from the winter-blooming japonica and autumn sasanqua that anchor Southern gardens to the wild species a serious collector hunts down, the fragrant lutchuensis, the great-fruited gigantocarpa, the tea plant itself. We keep more of these in circulation than almost any nursery in the country.
Beyond the camellias the family opens out. Stewartia brings small deciduous trees with white midsummer flowers, fierce fall color, and trunks of exfoliating, muscled bark that carry the winter garden. Franklinia alatamaha, found on the Altamaha River by the Bartrams in the 1760s and never seen wild since, survives only in cultivation, and every plant alive descends from that one collection. Gordonia, the native loblolly bay, is a towering evergreen cousin, and rarer still are Schima, Polyspora, and the strange intergeneric hybrids of Schima and Franklinia that only a handful of growers have ever raised.
What the family asks is fairly uniform: an acid, humus-rich, well-drained soil, shelter from hard wind, and a place in sun to part shade. Give them that and the tea family repays a garden across the whole calendar, in evergreen structure, in flowers that come when little else will bloom, and in fall color and bark when the deciduous kinds turn. Browse the named forms in our Camellias, and find the larger trees and shrubs among our Large Shrubs.
