Practical camellia care from two decades in the garden
Helen Pritchard · August 14, 2026
My inbox has been overflowing lately with photos of struggling camellias. “Is she dying?” people ask. “Should I dig her up?” “Will she come back?” I understand the panic. A camellia in decline can look genuinely hopeless—wilted leaves, yellowing growth, dropped buds. But here’s what twenty-plus years of tending over two hundred named cultivars has … Read more
Helen Pritchard · August 14, 2026
I’m standing in my zone 7b garden on a chilly December morning, and there’s a camellia in full bloom behind me. It’s ‘Donation’—an orchid-pink semiflower so generous with its petals that I swear it produces more flowers than foliage. Around it, a dozen other cultivars are either budding or already flowering, completely unbothered by the … Read more
Helen Pritchard · August 14, 2026
Post-bloom boost: After the main flower flush in late winter or early spring, apply a light second dose of granular feed. Growth is accelerating, and a modest nutrient top-up supports healthy foliage. Summer stop: By late summer, stop fertilising altogether. Continuing to feed at this stage encourages soft, tender new growth that won’t harden off … Read more
Helen Pritchard · August 6, 2026
# Camellia Thrips: Identification, Damage, and Treatment I remember the moment I first spotted something wrong with my Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide.’ Tiny silvery patches had appeared on the upper surfaces of several leaves, almost like sunscald. The plant sat in a bright corner of my garden, so I assumed—wrongly—that it was sun damage. I left … Read more
Helen Pritchard · August 6, 2026
I get this question at least once a month, usually from someone standing in their garden in late winter, watching a few straggly blooms appear after weeks of heavy flowering. “Helen,” they ask hopefully, “is my camellia reblooming? Can camellias bloom twice a year?” Short answer: no. An individual camellia plant does not produce two … Read more
Helen Pritchard · July 24, 2026
Kneeling beside a client’s newly installed 2-gallon nursery plant last week, I got the question again—the one I field constantly: “When does this thing actually turn into a real shrub?” She’d just tucked her sasanqua into the ground and was already eyeing the bare patch of fence she wanted it to cover, wondering whether that … Read more
Helen Pritchard · July 15, 2026
Kitchen scraps alone won’t build the kind of camellia collection people photograph. I hear a version of this question constantly—usually phrased as “so you just toss coffee grounds and banana peels around and that’s it?”—from folks who’ve seen pictures of my 200-plus shrubs and assumed good intentions plus compost equals thriving plants. Truthfully, no. And … Read more
Helen Pritchard · July 15, 2026
Two hundred million years — give or take a few million — is roughly how long camellias have been sorting out which plants make good neighbors in the wild, long before any of us started drawing up companion-planting charts. And yet the internet keeps recycling the same handful of pairings: azaleas here, hydrangeas there, rinse … Read more
Helen Pritchard · July 7, 2026
Can you actually squeeze another plant into the same pot as your camellia? Short answer: yes, provided you’re picky about the candidates and you accept that a shared container plays by a completely different rulebook than a mixed border does. Visitors to my patio ask me this constantly, usually while staring at a 50-litre tub … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 28, 2026
Back in the winter of my fifth year growing camellias seriously, I nearly lost an entire bed because I misread what was happening in front of me. I’d stepped out with a mug of tea to admire ‘Debutante’ — a soft blush japonica that had anchored my Zone 8a border for over a decade at … Read more