One of the wrongly named plants that had been exercising me recently is a bush in the oldest of the European sections that is labelled Duchesse Decazes. There are actually three plants in this section, 5A, with that name and two are currently in flower. One appears to be correct and looks like this.

The other one is very different and clearly wrong, in that it doesn’t match any of the descriptions or pictures that I’ve been able to find of ‘Duchess Decazes’. They’re a tricky lot, these old bicolors. They have nearly all given rise to small families of sports, so my first thought was whether it was a mutation, but it’s a solid, clear red and that seemed unlikely.

Yesterday I was in an American section and came across ‘Firebird’ in flower. It seemed unlikely that a fairly modern American variety would have become confused with an old European but the similarity was there and they were flowering at the same time. I cut a shoot of ‘Firebird’ and took it along to compare minutely with the putative ‘Duchesse Decazes’. In this picture the flower on the right is from ‘Firebird’ and the two on the left from the supposed ‘Duchesse Decazes’.   Not ‘Duchesse Decazes’ any more. I could find no significant differences in either flowers or foliage so I believe that’s another error resolved.

In the same section is a plant labelled ‘Bonomiana’ which, when the whole section was being hard pruned in spring 2019 I asked to be spared as it had not flowered since its last hair cut and I hadn’t had an opportunity to verify it’s identity. Yesterday I spotted a few blooms opening. It appears to be identical to two plants elsewhere that are labelled ‘Tricolor Sieboldii’, a name that is a synonym for ‘Tricolor’ and which makes no sense whatever. It also appears to be identical to one in the English section 2A which is labelled ‘Alba Plena’. Unhelpfully there is another Camellia in 2A labelled ‘Alba Plena’ but it is clearly not the same.

There are quite a number of formal double white varieties around so I’m not optimistic about pinning this one down but it does have a few notable characteristics. The flowers are quite small, 7-8 cm across at most. They shatter very readily, more than once I tried to manipulate a flower into a better position for taking its picture only to have it disintegrate in a shower of petals. The growth habit is dense and very upright, the more so on young or heavily pruned plants. As far as the Mt Edgcumbe collection goes, it is the first formal double white to be flowering.

I was pleased to find flowers out on a couple of recent additions to the collection. ‘Dream Girl’ completes the trio of Girls raised by Howard Asper from sasanqua x reticulata crosses. It will be interesting to compare the performance of the three varieties in similar conditions.

The other one is a seedling I raised some years ago from open pollinated seed collected from C. reticulata ‘Mary Williams’. Most of the progeny were singles like the parent but a few produced semi-double flowers. The bloom has only just opened and will get bigger; the colour is a fairly fierce pink. When I first saw a flower on it I fancied there was the influence of something other than C. reticulata in it, presumably that pollen had been carried in from elsewhere, there being nothing in the immediate vicinity flowering at the same time. ‘Serendipity’ seemed an appropriate working name. I’ll give it a year or two to really get established before making a decision on whether to register it.