Camellia lutchuensis

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.

The name records the origin. Lutchu, or Loochoo, is an old Western rendering of the Ryukyu Islands, the long arc of subtropical islands south of Japan, and the species is native there and on Taiwan, reaching only the southernmost fringe of China around Guangxi and Hong Kong. Older nursery copy that files the plant simply as Chinese sells the truth short; the heart of the range is the Ryukyus. The genus itself honors Georg Josef Kamel, the Moravian Jesuit and pharmacist who botanized in the Philippines and whom Linnaeus chose to commemorate.

Among camellia breeders this modest shrub is a celebrity, the fountainhead of nearly every fragrant hybrid in the trade. From the early 1960s onward, hybridizers crossed Camellia lutchuensis into garden camellias to carry the scent forward, and the parade of perfumed offspring runs long: 'Cinnamon Cindy,' 'Fragrant Pink,' 'High Fragrance,' 'Scentuous,' 'Sweet Emily Kate,' and many more, all tracing their fragrance to this one wild parent. Grown on its own roots, the species offers that heritage undiluted.

Camellia lutchuensis is a touch tender, happiest in USDA zones 8 and 9, though sheltered forms have proven reasonably hardy to zone 7b, and north of that the twiggy, restrained habit takes well to a large pot that can winter under cover. Give the plant dappled shade and an acidic, moist, well-drained soil, and above all site the shrub where the nose will find it: beside a door, a path, or a window where the late-winter-into-spring scent can drift indoors. The flowers are small; the fragrance is the whole point.