Camellia saluenensis

Camellia saluenensis is not the flashiest camellia in the garden, but few have done more to shape the ones that are. This upright, densely leafy evergreen carries small, single, funnel-shaped flowers in soft pink, opening from late winter into spring, and stands as one of the two parents behind the celebrated Camellia williamsii hybrids that carried camellia growing into colder gardens.

A word on the name, since accuracy matters: the correct spelling is Camellia saluenensis, for the Salween River, the great river known in China as the Nu Jiang that cuts through western Yunnan, where the plant grows wild on the mountains between the Salween and the Shweli between roughly one and three thousand meters. The trade has long shortened the epithet to saluensis, and that shorter form still lingers in older labels and in our web address, though saluenensis is the name to trust. The Scottish plant hunter George Forrest collected and introduced the species around 1917, sending seed home to J.C. Williams at Caerhays in Cornwall.

At Caerhays, Williams crossed Forrest's plants with Camellia japonica and raised the first Camellia williamsii hybrids, among them 'J.C. Williams,' 'St Ewe,' and 'Mary Christian,' while at Borde Hill Colonel Stephenson Clarke used the same species to raise the most famous of them all, the soft pink 'Donation.' The williamsii hybrids inherited from this parent their hardiness, their long free-flowering season, and the tidy habit of dropping spent blooms cleanly rather than clinging to them, browned, the way a japonica will. The genus honors Georg Josef Kamel, the Moravian Jesuit whom Linnaeus commemorated, though he never saw the plant that bears his name.

In the garden, treat Camellia saluenensis as the collector's original behind the famous hybrids: an upright, bushy shrub for dappled shade and acidic, humus-rich, well-drained soil, hardy through USDA zones 7 to 9 with a little shelter at the cold edge, where the species is a touch more tender than the offspring. The single pink flowers open early, when the garden is still bare, and draw the first bees; the glossy foliage holds all year. Grow this one for the flowers, and for the pleasure of keeping the wild parent alongside 'Donation' and the rest of the line.