A few years I bought a fall-blooming camellia that was supposedly cold hardy. I planted, tended and fussed over it because I wanted the beautiful rose-like flowers to light up my garden in the late fall. It obliged me by surviving exactly one year. Failure doesn\u2019t usually faze me, but for some reason I did not feel compelled to try again. Then, this past Thanksgiving, I was out for a walk and saw a camellia covered with fat buds. I felt the pull of plant fever and, like all gardeners who have loved and lost, I thought, \u201cThis time will be different.\u201d
\nOf course, I am well aware of the adage attributed to Albert Einstein that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I am not insane, except at certain times of the year when I am alone with garden catalogs, so I will treat my second camellia differently than my first.
\nI bought my first camellia because I fell madly in love with it at a garden center. Clearly mere passion was not enough to sustain the relationship. Common sense dictates that my next camellia commitment should be an arranged marriage, preceded by lots of research. Attention to detail will replace pulse-pounding attraction in the interest of a better long term outcome.
\nThe patron saint of modern cold-tolerant camellias was a plant scientist, Dr. William Ackerman\u20141924-2013–who spent the latter part of his career at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. Dr. Ackerman was charged with overseeing the Arboretum\u2019s camellia collection during a time that included two successive harsh winters, 1976-77 and 1977-78. Of the 956 outdoor camellias in the collection, only 15 were still alive by the spring of 1978. Two shrubs in particular had thrived through the cold and they became the starting point of Ackerman\u2019s breeding efforts. The plants, \u2018Lu Shan Snow\u2019 and \u2018Plain Jane\u2019 were varieties of Camellia oleifera, a native of China, grown primarily for its oil. Though oleifera blooms are pretty, they are not nearly as showy as those of the more familiar Camellia japonica, which flowers in late winter and early spring.
\nAckerman began crossing species and varieties in the hopes of breeding camellia plants that were beautiful, cold-hardy and garden-worthy. He crossed the oleifera plants with varieties of Camellia hiemalis, a Chinese species, and\/or Camellia sasanqua, an autumn-blooming species native to Japan. The whole process was time consuming. The hand pollinated plants had to produce seeds, which were then planted out. It might take up to six years before the resulting plants were mature enough to bloom and evaluate. Ackerman\u2019s efforts eventually paid off in fifty new varieties of cold hardy camellias, some of which were able to survive temperatures as low as five below zero\u2014USDA plant hardiness zone 6b. After he retired from the National Arboretum in 1984, Ackerman continued to work with camellias and wrote two books on the subject.
\nThe Ackerman hybrids often have \u201cwintery\u201d names, like the white-flowered \u2018Winter\u2019s Hope\u2019 or pink \u2018Winter\u2019s Beauty\u2019. Some of his later efforts have \u201cAshton\u201d in their names, presumably because they were bred in Ashton, Maryland, where Ackerman had a farm. Among the Ashton series is the double pink \u2018Ashton\u2019s Ballet\u2019. The \u201cballet\u201d name reminds me of Sir Frederick Ashton, the celebrated English dancer\/choreographer, who created a work, \u201cMarguerite and Armand\u201d, inspired by the nineteenth century French novel La Dame aux Camellias (The Lady of the Camellias) by Alexandre Dumas fils. Ashton\u2019s work was a memorable ballet, created for two of the most celebrated dancers in ballet history, Rudolph Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. Perhaps Ackerman was making a clever reference to both the town and the ballet. Such a gesture, if it was made, would be both romantic and fitting.
\nAnd, in fact, my arranged marriage with a cold hardy camellia may come down to romance after all. I am drawn to \u2018Ashton\u2019s Ballet\u2019, which features a rose-like form in shades of pink on an upright shrub. It is hardy to USDA plant hardiness Zone 6a, which means it should be fine in a protected spot in my Zone 7 garden. If I were to order it for spring planting, the shrub would have plenty of time to establish itself during the growing season. I would not have to worry about dousing it with deer repellant, because camellias are generally not browsed by hungry deer. I find that love affairs with plants go much more smoothly without third-party intrusions by Mr. Antlers and his ever-increasing family.
\nAll camellias, including the cold-hardy types, thrive in the kind of well-drained, acid soil that supports azaleas, rhododendrons and laurels. Light shade is best, because too much sun can scorch the leaves. Water young camellias regularly, especially during dry periods, and fertilize according to manufacturer\u2019s directions with an organic product designed for acid-loving plants. Prune to shape the plant when necessary, but wait until after it blooms.
\nIf you want to invest in a cold-hardy camellia, look carefully at the catalog information or plant tag and check the USDA plant hardiness numbers. One good mail order source is Camellia Forest Nursery, 620 Hwy 54 West, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, (919) 968-0504; http:\/\/www.camforest.com.<\/p>\n
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A few years I bought a fall-blooming camellia that was supposedly cold hardy. I planted, tended and fussed over it because I wanted the beautiful rose-like flowers to light up my garden in the late fall. It obliged me by surviving exactly one year. Failure doesn\u2019t usually faze me, but for some reason I did … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1333,1335,1338,1334,491,1337,1336],"class_list":["post-1801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-camellia","tag-camellia-oleifera","tag-cold-hardy-camellias","tag-fall-flowering-shrubs","tag-flowering-shrubs","tag-u-s-national-arboretum","tag-william-ackerman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1802,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1801\/revisions\/1802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}