Bred by Les Jury in New Plymouth, New Zealand, first flowered in 1971 and registered in 1976, 'Jury's Yellow' is the camellia that finally cracked the yellow code, or came as close as Western breeders could get before the Chinese yellow species (Camellia nitidissima) made the leap from botanical archive to nursery bench. Jury worked only with white japonicas, betting that the gold of the stamens could be coaxed to bleed into the petaloids at a flower's center. The bet paid off. The result is an anemone-form bloom, nine clean white petals cupped around a thick boss of cream-yellow petaloids, the color of fresh butter rather than crayon yellow.
An honest admission to start: we do not know her name. Camellia japonica has been bred and named for the better part of three centuries, the roll of registered cultivars runs well into the thousands, and behind those stand thousands more good selections that were grown, loved, handed over a fence, and quietly parted from their labels along the way. This is one of the latter, a pale-pink japonica of real quality and no surviving paperwork, the kind of plant that turns up in old Southern gardens where someone's grandmother knew exactly what it was and never thought to write it down.
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.
There is a quiet poetry in a camellia's defiance of the cold, a flowering that comes not in spring's abundance but in the leanest stretch of the year. Few cultivars speak that winter sonnet as clearly as Camellia 'Crimson Candles', a hybrid of Camellia reticulata and Camellia fraterna.
Camellia saluensis 'Appleblossom' is a pink-flowered selection of the Salween camellia, chosen for the abundance of soft, single, apple-blossom-pink flowers borne in late winter and spring. What sets this plant apart is not a registration certificate but a story: the stock came originally from the Norfolk, Virginia garden of the late Frederic Heutte, the French-born plantsman who served as the first director of Norfolk Botanical Garden.
A modern Franklin tree with year-round presence and late-summer perfume. ×Schimlinia 'Schima Lina Ding Dong' is a rare intergeneric hybrid bred to capture the romance of the lost Franklin tree while adding real garden durability. Raised by the Mountain Crop Improvement Lab at NC State, the selection crosses Franklinia alatamaha, the legendary Georgia native long gone from the wild and famous for luminous white flowers, with Schima remotiserrata, a broadleaf evergreen of the tea family from Asia. The result is an elegant evergreen carrying fragrant, white, camellia-like blooms in late summer, just when the garden most wants a fresh highlight.
Two camellias do most of the work in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, in countless named forms. The Far East holds far more, and Woodlanders is among the few nurseries offering the lesser-known species to gardeners here. Camellia crapnelliana, the Crapnell camellia, is one of the most distinctive: a slow, upright evergreen first described from Hong Kong Island and named for the collector Crapnell.
Most gardeners who grow camellias know two of them. Camellia japonica opens in winter, C. sasanqua in autumn, and between the two a practiced collector can have flowers from October through March. What happens in April is generally someone else's problem.
Camellia euryoides offers a quiet counterpoint to the camellias most familiar to American gardeners. Where Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua have long defined the genus in cultivation here, those two represent only a sliver of a far broader Asian lineage. C. euryoides, a shrub or small tree of the subtropical forests of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi, belongs to that richer world of species camellias: subtler, finer in texture, and made for gardeners curious about the genus beyond its showiest forms.
Camellia fraterna is a camellia stripped back to wild beginnings, a species from the hills of eastern China far removed from the big, blowsy blooms of the garden japonicas and sasanquas. Where those carry a few large flowers, this one covers slender, upright branches in a snowfall of small, single, white flowers, faintly pink outside and softly fragrant, that arch the stems with their sheer number. The small, pointed evergreen leaves and open, airy habit give the plant an easy, natural grace.
Camellia gigantocarpa is a rare and remarkable species from the subtropical forests of southern China, first documented in the wild in the 1980s in Guangxi Province. The name says the essential thing: gigantocarpa, giant fruit. Where most camellias are grown for flowers, this species is prized above all for the great woody seed capsules that follow them, among the largest in the entire genus.
High in the shaded ravines of Hong Kong's Tai Mo Shan, a single camellia tree stood unrecognized until 1955, when the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department documented an unexpected beauty among the undergrowth. The botanist J. R. Sealy soon described a new species and named the tree Camellia granthamiana, honoring the then-Governor Sir Alexander Grantham.
'Julia Mackintosh' is a Woodlanders introduction with a family story behind the name. A chance Camellia sasanqua seedling that came up here at the nursery, the plant was selected and propagated by George Mitchell and named for the late Julia Mackintosh, who with her husband Robert founded Woodlanders. The parentage is unrecorded, though the flowers point to 'Leslie Ann', one of the nursery's long-time favorites, as the likely mother.
The United States National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. sits on 446 acres of rolling ground above the Anacostia River, a place where serious horticultural work has gone on quietly for the better part of a century. Camellia japonica 'Anacostia' takes both the name and the pedigree from that institution, selected at the Arboretum for cold hardiness and reliable performance at the northern edge of camellia country.
To see what a camellia can become when it is left happy for decades, look no farther than 'Greensboro Red'. At the original Woodlanders nursery site, this cultivar has grown into a remarkable hedgerow some fifteen feet tall over more than thirty years, a living reminder that camellias are not merely shrubs but legacy plants. Robert Mackintosh planted that first hedgerow in the early 1970s, from stock acquired at a small local nursery here in Aiken, South Carolina.
'Imura' is a refined white form of Camellia japonica, grown for elegant semi-double pure white flowers set against narrow, glossy evergreen leaves. The clean white bloom and slightly fine-textured foliage give the plant a quiet, luminous presence in shade, a contrast to the heavier reds and pinks that dominate the genus.
'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.
A camellia with a story we can only half tell. Years ago a plant was dropped at the nursery in Aiken, left for a friend to carry home to Korea. The pickup never came, and the plant stayed; the label, somewhere in the years that followed, was lost. We propagated her anyway, because she was too good to let slip, and because she has the particular bone structure of a real cultivar. Someone, somewhere, named her.
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.
