October 2023

I am going to try to create a short video at roughly monthly intervals to give you a better idea of the camellia collection in its setting. My first attempt was filmed on 9th October 2023 when the autumn flowering ‘sasanqua’ camellias were just beginning to perform. It’s just short of 11 minutes long and looking back at it, I wondered if I shouldn’t have made more of the fact that there are question marks hanging over a few of the varieties I included, in that there is one that I don’t know the name of at all, and three others, ‘New Dawn’, ‘Sparkling Burgundy’ and ‘Setsugekka’, where I have doubts.

‘New Dawn’ is apparently a synonym for the variety ‘Cleopatra’. I have what I believe to be ‘Cleopatra’ in my own garden and I’m not convinced the two plants labelled ‘New Dawn’ at Mt Edgcumbe are the same.

‘Sparkling Burgundy’ may be incorrect and it has been suggested that it is ‘Showa-no-sakae’. There is a plant labelled ‘Showa-no-sakae’ in the collection and I’m inclined to think the two plants are different varieties, though they are very similar. They are growing in rather different conditions though, which may explain their differences rather than their being different varieties.

‘Setsugekka’ is represented by two plants in the collection, growing no more than five metres apart. One is an old bush in poor health, with yellowish leaves but still flowering well. The other was reduced to a half metre stump a few years ago by a tree falling on it. It has recovered exceptionally well with long and vigorous upright growth and looks so different from the first plant that it is hard to believe they are the same variety. I am very tempted to chop the other one down too but at the moment they represent two extremes of the variability shown by a single variety and there is a suggestion that they may not be ‘Setsugekka’ but ‘Kenkyo’. Elsewhere in the collection is a plant that I relabelled to ‘Kenkyo’, from its earlier label of ‘Chansonette’, a name that was obviously wrong for a variety with single white flowers. I saw a plant growing elsewhere labelled ‘Kenkyo’, which I was convinced was the same. It is very distinct from the two plants of ‘Setsugekka’, in leaf even more than in flower. I have also compared it with a variety being widely sold under the name ‘Narcissiflora’. This is a name that was given to an unidentified plant in France that subsequently turned out to be identical to ‘Setsugekka’. The plant that I had relabelled as ‘Kenkyo’ is identical to ‘Narcissiflora’, meaning that it is not ‘Kenkyo’ but ‘Setsugekka’. Maybe then, I have the Mt Edgcumbe plants of ‘Setsugekka’ and ‘Kenkyo’ the wrong way round.

It’s a conundrum I have visited before, in two posts I did in November 2021, which are here and here.