Practical camellia care from two decades in the garden
Helen Pritchard · January 12, 2026
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…
Helen Pritchard · January 9, 2026
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…
Helen Pritchard · January 7, 2026
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,…
Helen Pritchard · January 4, 2026
I still remember standing in the garden that March morning, coffee going cold in my hand, staring at my twelve-year-old camellia like I’d just watched a car crash in slow motion. She’d been loaded with fat pink buds. A hard…
Helen Pritchard · December 31, 2025
It was a Tuesday in January when my neighbor Linda showed up at my door holding her phone out like it was evidence at a crime scene. On the screen: a photo of her camellia, leaves slightly curled, a few…
Helen Pritchard · December 28, 2025
It was the third week of January, and I was standing in my garden at 6 a.m. in my dressing gown, watching a hard frost settle over my camellias like a slow disaster. One of them — a Jury’s Yellow’…
Helen Pritchard · December 26, 2025
I still remember standing in my backyard on a January morning, staring at my beloved Kramer’s Supreme’ camellia, its buds turned to brown mush overnight. My neighbor Patty had told me back in October not to worry — “camellias are…
Helen Pritchard · December 21, 2025
An unseasonably long gray spell settled over my zone 8 garden in early January this past winter, and for almost ten days straight, the only real color anywhere on the property came from a single ‘Yuletide’ clinging to its last few blooms. Everything else had either finished or hadn’t started yet. That gap taught me … Read more
Helen Pritchard · December 19, 2025
That plastic tag stuck in the pot at the nursery gives you a photo, a cultivar name, and maybe a vague note about “part shade.” What it won’t tell you is how to sequence your bloom season, why one japonica might sulk in your particular soil while another thrives, or how a single missed detail … Read more
Helen Pritchard · December 16, 2025
Extend Your Camellia Season: Varieties for Continuous Blooms Hi there! I’m Helen Pritchard, and as a lifelong gardener in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve spent over two decades cultivating camellias. With more than 200 named cultivars under my belt — from sasanquas to japonicas and hybrids — I’ve learned a thing or two about how to … Read more