Camellia oleifera

Three things to know about this camellia. First, it is the most economically important non-tea camellia in the world. China has cultivated Camellia oleifera for over 2,300 years for the oil pressed from its seeds — a sweetish, light, monounsaturated cooking oil chemically very similar to olive oil (about 80% oleic acid in both), used for cooking, traditional cosmetics, hair tonics, and as the historic anti-corrosion treatment for Japanese woodworking tools and chef's knives. Globally, tea oil sits in the same category as olive, palm, and coconut as one of the four major woody oil crops on Earth. This is a working tree.

Second, it is the most quietly important camellia in modern North American horticulture — and almost no one knows it. In the late 1970s, a series of brutal winters at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., destroyed 941 of the 956 camellias in the collection. The handful that survived included specimens of Camellia oleifera, which had passed through unharmed. Dr. William Ackerman, then a research geneticist at the Arboretum, took notice. Beginning in 1979 he began crossing the cold-hardy C. oleifera — particularly the cultivar 'Lu Shan Snow', introduced from the Lu Shan Botanical Garden in China in 1948 — with C. sasanqua, C. hiemalis, and C. vernalis. The resulting hybrids, released in 1991 as the Winter Series ('Polar Ice', 'Snow Flurry', 'Winter's Hope', 'Winter's Joy', 'Pink Icicle', 'Winter's Star', and others), are the reason camellias can now be reliably grown into USDA zone 6. Every fall-blooming Ackerman hybrid camellia in an East Coast garden traces back to C. oleifera. The species is the genetic foundation of cold-hardy camellia cultivation in the United States.

Third — and this is the one most people miss when they hear "tea-oil camellia" and think of it as utilitarian — the plant itself is beautiful. Smooth, peeling, cinnamon-to-tan bark on mature trunks. Glossy, deeply serrated, willow-textured evergreen leaves. Single white flowers two to three inches across, sometimes flushed pink at the edges, with a generous boss of golden stamens, opening from October through January and carrying a soft sweet fragrance unusual in fall-blooming camellias. The petals drop individually when spent — what camellia growers call self-grooming — so the plant doesn't accumulate the slumping brown decay that bothers so many of the older japonica selections. Slow-growing, eventually reaching 10–20 feet over decades; grows as a multi-trunked large shrub or small tree depending on how it is pruned.

For the gardener building a tea garden alongside a C. sinensis, the camellia collector ready to acquire the species behind every modern cold-hardy hybrid, or anyone working in zone 6 or 7 who wants a fragrant fall-flowering evergreen with documented winter survival down to -15°F. A genuinely useful plant masquerading as a beautiful one — or vice versa, depending on which side you approach from.