Schima remotiserrata

If you already grow a camellia, a stewartia, or a Franklinia, you know most of what a Schima is trying to be. The genus sits in the tea family, evergreen where the American members are deciduous, and carries the family flower in the purest form the family manages: five white petals cupped around a dense boss of gold stamens, two inches or so across, fragrant, and scattered through the crown in summer rather than delivered all at once. Schima remotiserrata is a southeast Chinese species, native to Fujian, Guangdong, eastern Guangxi, southern Hunan, and Jiangxi, and almost unknown in American gardens; the epithet refers to the leaf margin, toothed at intervals rather than continuously, which is the field character that separates this species from a shelf full of near relatives.

The genus name is a piece of quiet observation. Schima derives from the Greek skiasma, a shadow, for the dense shade a mature crown throws. That is not marketing; these are forest trees, and in the wild parts of the genus exceed a hundred feet. In cultivation on this side of the Pacific expect something far more reasonable, an upright evergreen of thirty to fifty feet over a long life, with handsome leathery foliage flushing bronze-red on new growth and holding good colour through winter.

The family connections are the interesting part, and Woodlanders has a stake in them. Schima is closest of the Asian tea-family genera to Franklinia alatamaha, the tree John and William Bartram found on the Altamaha River in Georgia in 1765 and which has not been seen in the wild since about 1803. That relationship is close enough to cross: the intergeneric hybrid ×Schimlinia floribunda, Franklinia crossed with Schima argentea, is a plant we grow and sell here, as is S. argentea itself and S. superba. Adding a fourth species to the bench is how a nursery finds out what else the genus will do, and anyone building a Theaceae collection now has another piece to place beside the stewartias and the gordonias.

Site the tree in full sun to light high shade, in acid, humus-rich, well-drained soil, and give real room; a shade tree that throws the shade the Greek name promises is not a courtyard plant. Water through establishment and in droughts, and mulch to keep the roots cool. One honest caution: Schima is subtropical to warm-temperate, and while young plants of the genus have taken temperatures as low as about eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, frost protection through the first winters is sensible and this species is untested across most of the country. Call the tree zone 8b to 10 for now, plant with a warm wall or an evergreen windbreak behind, and understand that you are helping find out where the limit actually is. That is a fair description of most of the interesting plants we sell.