Transplanting camellias has always made me nervous. After more than two decades of growing them here in Zone 8b, I’ve learned that even a healthy plant can sulk for a full season after being moved. Last spring, I had to…
Last February, I watched helplessly as a hard freeze crept in overnight and torched the open blooms on my Professor Charles S. Sargent’ Japonica. The flowers had been absolutely perfect — deep crimson, fully double, just days from their peak….
My camellia hedge has been the pride of my backyard for nearly two decades. However, somewhere around year fifteen, it stopped being manageable and started being a problem. What began as a tidy row of Camellia japonica Kramer’s Supreme’ had…
Last November, I walked out to check on my camellias and noticed something that made my stomach drop. A white, waxy crust had built up along the stems of my oldest Japonica — Kramer’s Supreme,’ a plant I’ve been nurturing…
Last spring, I hit a wall I hadn’t expected after two decades of growing camellias. My raised beds — which I’d built specifically for acid-loving plants — started showing signs of pH drift. Leaves on my Kanjiro’ Sasanqua turned a…
In the spring of my ninth year growing camellias, I walked out to my largest bed and found three established plants sitting in standing water that had been there for at least four days. Two of them were Survivor’ japonicas…
When I planted my first camellia back in 2003, I had no idea what I was doing. I bought a generic, unlabeled plant from a big-box nursery, stuck it in full sun with clay soil, and watched it slowly sulk…
I still remember the spring I lost a twelve-year-old Survivor’ camellia to what I can only describe as fertilizer enthusiasm. It was my fourth season growing camellias seriously, and I pushed nitrogen too early, right before a late frost snapped…
Three springs ago, I stood in front of a Survivor’ camellia I had planted seven years earlier and felt genuinely defeated. The leaves had gone from that deep, waxy green I love to a sickly yellow-green with darker veins running…
Three years. Three springs of walking past that April Kiss’ camellia in my side garden, watching it push out healthy dark green leaves while producing exactly zero flowers. I fertilized it. I watered it. I talked to it — yes,…
