Practical camellia care from two decades in the garden
Helen Pritchard Helen Pritchard · June 26, 2026
Most camellia growers don’t realize tea scale is already on their plants. I didn’t either—not until I zoomed in on the underside of a leaf from my ‘Yuletide’ one February morning and found what looked like tiny cream-colored bumps arranged in neat rows. That’s when I understood why my otherwise healthy japonica had started dropping … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 24, 2026
A soggy stretch we had this past March — nearly ten straight days of rain here in zone 8a — left my japonica beds littered with collapsed, mud-brown blooms, and it drove home the question readers send me more than any other: is deadheading camellias actually necessary? On the surface it seems trivial. Snap off … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 21, 2026
Monthly Camellia Care Calendar: What to Do Every Month of the Year Here’s something no plastic nursery tag will ever spell out: camellias don’t run on a single, generic “water and feed occasionally” schedule — they move through a distinct twelve-month rhythm, and missing the window for any one stage can cost you next season’s … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 19, 2026
I still remember crouching in front of a ‘Debutante’ one November afternoon, counting its flower buds — eleven, maybe twelve, scattered thinly along stems that should have carried three times that number after a good rainy summer. That meager count told me everything I needed to know: somewhere the previous year, a badly timed cut … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 16, 2026
Almost every camellia grower eventually settles on one watering routine and sticks to it year-round — the same amount, the same frequency, whether it’s February frost or July swelter. That assumption feels reasonable. It’s also exactly what cost me a ‘Nuccio’s Gem.’ The plant wasn’t lost to frost, and it wasn’t neglect either — it … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 14, 2026
There’s a corner bed along the east fence in my own garden — the one shaded by an old dogwood — where a client’s photo once made me stop and stare. She’d sent me a picture of her camellia looking exactly like mine did years ago: deep green, dense, healthy as can be, and utterly … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 12, 2026
Feed a camellia the wrong way, and it will punish you slowly and silently for months. That’s the blunt truth of it. I learned this the hard way when my ‘Debutante’ japonicas started throwing chlorotic yellow leaves and my prized ‘Survivor’ reticulata all but refused to bloom — both consequences of feeding choices I’d made … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 9, 2026
Picture a torn plant tag in someone’s hand — that’s the image I keep coming back to from a spring garden show, where a woman stood at my table holding two labels, unable to decide between them. “Sasanqua or japonica — which one?” It’s a question I field constantly, and after two decades tending upward … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 7, 2026
“What do I even put around a camellia once it’s planted?” a fellow gardener asked me at a plant swap a few years back, phone in hand, showing me a photo of her solitary Camellia × williamsii ‘Donation’ surrounded by nothing but mulch. Funnily enough, I’d asked myself the same thing not long before, staring … Read more
Helen Pritchard · June 4, 2026
Crouched beside a hulking six-foot shrub this morning, secateurs in hand, I keep staring at the little plastic tag still zip-tied to its trunk — it says “compact.” That single word has misled me more times than I care to admit over the past fifteen years of buying nursery-labeled camellias, only to watch them balloon … Read more