Practical camellia care from two decades in the garden
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 · May 21, 2026
A late-February hard freeze dipped into the low twenties here in my zone 8a garden a few years back, and it pushed me to dig up and relocate a ten-year-old Camellia japonica ‘Elegans’ that had been sitting in a spot suddenly too exposed to the wind. Sliding the root ball free of its planting hole, … Read more
Helen Pritchard · May 14, 2026
Nearly every camellia grower I’ve ever swapped notes with operates on the same unspoken assumption: the ground beneath a mature shrub is simply lost real estate, destined to stay bare or scraggly no matter what you throw at it. I believed that too for years, standing under my oldest camellia—a towering ‘Donation’ japonica that had … Read more