Camellia japonica

An honest admission to start: we don't 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 are 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.

What we can tell you is what she shows. Soft, clear pink flowers open in the cool months, late winter into earliest spring, in the unhurried, many-petaled manner of a good japonica, set against the thick, glossy evergreen leaves the species is named for; tsubaki, in Japan, means something close to thick-leaf tree. She carries the upright, well-mannered habit you want from a camellia, and performs the way camellias have performed here since they reached the gardens of the Old South in the early 1800s and declined to leave.

There is a particular pleasure in an unnamed plant. No registry to consult, no cultivar to measure her against, nothing to live up to but the flower itself, which is lovely and entirely sufficient. For the gardener who would rather keep one good camellia with a lost name than three famous ones with their papers in order, here she is: pink, anonymous, and asking only for part shade and a little patience.

Standing on: The first japonica grew in England before 1739, it has become the most popular ornamental camellia with thousands of named varieties, and the genus was named by Linnaeus for the Jesuit Georg Joseph Kamel, who likely never saw the plant. By 1833 at least 50 cultivars were available from nurseries and found ready acceptance in the gardens of the Old South; it is reliably hardy zones 7–9. It is native to Japan, Korea, and parts of China, known in Japan as tsubaki (from "thick-leaf" or "glossy-leaf tree"), blooms white, pink, or red from late winter to early spring, and has over 2,000 cultivars.