No more Camellias

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No more Camellias

By Judith Joyce

Max my husband & I started growing camellias in 1974. We already had some large ones in our garden but we wanted a few more. Max knew of a few nurseries that grew camellias’ so seeing it was camellia season we thought we would go and take a look at some

The first one we went to was called "Camellia Grove" which was at St Ives. 

Button N Bows

Big Mistake because of this place we really fell in love with these wonderful flowers for here there were so many different colours, shapes and sizes we didn't know which ones we wanted. "Camellia Grove” was one of the dearest nurseries (so we found out), but I really fell in love with one called "Button N Bows” Our collection had started.

So starting the next weekend and now armed with the catalogue we had acquired from Camellia Grove in which we marked all the camellias we would like to obtain. We set out in search of other nurseries that sold our precious flowers, hopefully much cheaper than the last one.
The first ones we tried were “The Three Bears” at Pennant Hills and Hargraves and Swane’s at Dural. They all had a good collection of the three well-known species to choose from. We were looking for Japonica (which were our favourite) and they were cheaper than the Grove.

We made a few additions to our collection the first weekend, one of which was Dahlohnega a beautiful white with a cream yellow tinge and a formal double bloom. Then the next weekend we were out again and we saw another that we liked, then another. So by the time we arrived home we had a dozen or so plants and we said “that will do us, we have enough now”.

Then we made another big mistake, we went and bought a camellia book with over a thousand different camellias with their photos in it.

As we went through the book we fell in love with so many we then had to find out where we could acquire these precious flowers.

I didn’t have a computer at the time so it was out with the Yellow pages looking up camellia growers, finding out if they had the ones we wanted. When we found the ones we were searching for, we would head off in the car the following weekends travelling all over Sydney and beyond, buying plants of all shapes and sizes. And every time when we arrived home with our bargains we would say “that’s it no more camellias”.

Then we discovered the Camellia shows, this was another source of viewing camellias. So off we would go again and saw more that we liked and not being able to resist we would travel home with another load.  

At first I was not so keen on Sasanqua but as our collection grew I started to like them more. They had a few advantages over the japonicas (which needed semi shade) Sasanquas could grow in full sun. They also were fast growing and bloomed a lot earlier, so having different varieties meant we had flowers in our garden for a longer time. So now we started to add them to our collection.

When our children were born we planted a camellia to commemorate the day. For my daughter it was “Japonica Susan Stone” a delicate pale pink formal double.

For our son it was “Sasanqua Mine-No-Yuki” a white semi double peony flower. They are both growing remarkably well and just like our two children my son’s plant is a lot taller than my daughter’s.

We then found that there were that there were some camellias that had lovely perfumes so we said, “we must have some of them” so the hunt was on again. Some of these were the original species and were very small but their perfume was divine.

And again we said no more, but as before we found one more variety that we must have. They were called Reticulata. They had huge beautiful flowers some up to 15cm in diameter, so some of these were added to our collection

In all we collected over one hundred and fifty different camellias of every size colour and shape and we love every one of them.

 No more camellias, ha, ha they are our famous last words.