Sometime around mid July last year a very large beech tree came down in section 1L, making a mess of a number of the camellias in the section. It was several weeks before the tree was completely cleared and the damage could be properly assessed.  At that time I noted that 8 were damaged but … Continue reading Never say die.

My note for 1G-006 'Blood of China' is short and to the point, it should be solid red and is bicolored. It's wrongly labelled, job done, move on, don't need to look at that again. Well today I looked a little closer. What I saw was that there are bicolored flowers, almost solid red versions … Continue reading You looked? Well look again.

I headed up to Mount Edgcumbe this morning, it being Tuesday. It was cloudy but dry when I set out. The Rame Peninsular, occupied at its eastern end by the Edgcumbe Estate, has its own climate. This morning it was 50m visibility fog, with a drizzle that was getting steadily heavier. I stayed an hour, … Continue reading Of Clouds and Silver Linings

Every year is an odd year. When you revisit the same place year after year you really notice the differences. This year at Mount Edgcumbe there seem to be a lot of exceptionally large blooms and a lot of exceptionally small blooms. That is, some varieties are flowering bigger than usual, some smaller. Another oddity … Continue reading It’s an odd year, as usual

Perhaps NASA could just do a quick whizz by Mt Edgcumbe with their Jupiter probe and see if they can make sense of Jupiter, the camellia variety. They might make more sense than I can. Oddly enough their probe is called Juno, which is a synonym for Jupiter in the camellia world. Not so very … Continue reading Joviality, sort of.

  There is not the remotest reason for these two taxa to become confused. I should probably put my hand up and admit my culpability inasmuch as when I was working on a nursery and selling camellias, we had a variety labelled Camellia pitardii which I knew even then to be wrong. We were buying … Continue reading ‘Ginryû’ & pitardii.

There is at Mount Edgcumbe a plant labelled Camellia pitardii, a name which I am as certain as I can be is wrong. That's the easy bit; the challenge now is to identify it correctly. It seems to me to bear a very close resemblance to another plant in the collection that is labelled Camellia … Continue reading New season, new puzzles.

It being Tuesday, my day was spent at Mount Edgcumbe. There are still a few sections of Camellia plantings that I have not properly documented. One such is the first group of Camellias that was planted to get the collection off the ground. This was back in 1976, when 50 plants, donated by the International … Continue reading A walk in the park