Practical camellia care from two decades in the garden
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 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
Helen Pritchard · June 2, 2026
Most camellias are odorless — full stop. That single fact catches nearly everyone off guard the first time they hear it, and I watched it land like a small deflating balloon at a winter garden society gathering last year when a member asked me point-blank which of my camellias smelled the best. Three dozen faces … Read more