The tail end of the camellia season always seems to bring with it a flurry of tasks that need to be completed before other competing interests become impossible to ignore.

My big task, as far as Mount Edgcumbe is concerned, has been to identify and map the Camellias in the Earl’s garden. This is the fenced in garden behind the main house and it is the only part of the park for which there is a charge for entry. I have put off cataloguing them because there are rather a lot of them and around two thirds are unlabelled. However, this year a certain amount of money became available for new plants and it was decided that they would be planted in the Earl’s garden. It seemed like the right time to take on the whole area.

It looks like I will be bringing 144 more Camellias into the collection records. 29 of these are new young plants, the rest established plants, most of which were planted between 25 and 30 years ago. It is beginning to look as if many of these are plants that were propagated from plants elsewhere in the collection that were represented by only a single specimen; they were intended to be duplicates. Some I have already managed to match to their parent and have been very pleased to see; there being a lot of plants in the collection that are certainly not in commerce and very possibly the only known specimen of their sort in the country.

There are also three much older plants, one in the Earl’s garden, two just outside. The one on the inside has mostly white formal double flowers with some pink flecks, then some pink formal double flowers with a white margin. It is a multi-stemmed plant and it could have been that there were two plants together, one white, the other pink, or that one might have been used as a rootstock onto which the other had been grafted. Careful scrutiny suggests that like most bicolored camellias, it is spontaneously sporting the different flower colours on the same plant. The white variant is particularly lovely and a couple of possible names have been suggested, but if you think you know its name for certain, I’d love to hear from you. For now it’s just EG-024, which doesn’t begin to do it justice.

The wall against which the plant may originally have been grown as a wall shrub is currently about 3m tall, the plant nearly twice that height. It would have been the back wall to a wing of the house, all of which was burned to a shell after being hit by an incendiary bomb in the second world war. The main house was restored but the wing, which wasn’t part of the original house, was not. Seemingly, the Camellia, growing on the other side of the wall, survived. It looks as if it has been pruned to about a metre from the ground in its past, perhaps in the aftermath of the inferno. Best guess at a planting date would be mid 1800’s but in truth, there is very little to go on.

Elsewhere in the collection there is still a lot that is flowering really well. It seems to me that many of the later blooms are bigger and better than I can remember them. I now have a name for 9-003, acquired under the name ‘China Clay’ but very obviously not that variety. It is Camellia japonica ‘Jack Jones Scented’, a seedling raised by Jimmy Smart at Marwood in 1968 but introduced to commerce by Jack Jones of Savannah, Georgia, USA, meaning that as far as the Camellia Register is concerned, it’s an American variety. When it was thought to be ‘China Clay’ it was planted in an English section of the collection and that is where it is going to stay. Here are a couple of pictures showing how variable it can be.

Camellia caudata is in the species section and a few years ago fell over. It lay where it fell because it was still attached, just, but seemed at risk of breaking off altogether if restored to the vertical. Eventually someone found the necessary courage, the plant survived and this year it is flowering; only the second time I have seen it do so. The flowers are so tiny that I would be surprised if anyone but me notices them. I must now try to verify that it is correctly identified.

To finish, one of those improbable sights that Camellias sometimes throw up and which I cannot immediately think of another plant that can do the same. C. japonica ‘Finlandia Variegated’ is a semi-double white with red stripes and flecks. Sometimes it produces solid red flowers, indeed another bush of the same variety just a few metres away has a whole branch of solid red flowers. This was particularly striking though.