By Lynn Welp
Home and Garden | Posted: Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:00 am
Unlike holiday plants such as poinsettias that last only one season, the Camellia sasanqua "Yuletide" is my seasonal pick because it's blooming right now.
It's known for its copious single brilliant red flowers with bright yellow stamens that will come back year after year.
Color is what we crave in a winter landscape whether that is on blooms or leaves. Thus, the best thing about these shrubs is that they present us blooms when everything else in the garden is down for their long winter's nap.
Yuletide always blooms around the holidays (November through January - depending on the weather). Otherwise it is a compact evergreen shrub with shiny, glossy leaves that offer a must-have "backbone" element to your garden the rest of the year.
Yuletide should be placed where it can be enjoyed in winter. It prefers light shade in summer (mine does fine on the west side of the house) but also loves the sun or partial shade.
They are considered drought tolerant once established. To prolong blooms, they may need some protection from our Pacific Northwest winter rains. If you tuck them up under the eaves remember that you'll have to give extra attention to watering.
They put on their best show next to an entry - one where everyone who walks past can take pleasure from.
Growing tips
Camellias benefit from moist, well-drained, acid soils with high organic matter. They don't require much fertilizer as too much fertilizer can cause them to grow leggy.
It's past prime time for planting these shrubs right now. For the future, planting in the fall will provide almost a full growing season's advantage over those planted in the spring - just by getting that head start on root growth. The key is to not plant them too deep or in soggy soil. Like most plants, these also don't like wet feet either.
I trim my Yuletide lightly each year now that it is established, just to shape. Doing this after it blooms will avoid damage to next season's blooms. They can max out from 5 to 10 feet as a hedge because of their fairly compact, slow-growing habit. (Some smaller varieties are out there too.)
After several years in the same place, mine has tickled the eaves for the first time this year, so it got cut back substantially.
History
The camellia was named for Georg Josef Kamel, a 17th century Moravian Jesuit missionary who introduced the camellia to the West from its Asian origins. Camellias are known to grow in the wild in Japan, China and other Pacific Rim countries.
The cultivar Yuletide comes from the Japanese - C. sasanqua species. Sasanquas are more sun-tolerant than the C. japonicas and will withstand temperatures 10 degrees colder in the winter. Sasanquas tolerate greater extremes in moisture than will most japonicas.
There are thousands of different camellia species and cultivars. Oolong tea comes from the young leaves of C. sinensis. However, its flowers are too minor to be considered as a landscape plant. C. japonica, C. sasanqua and their hybrids are much more attractive.
Cold hardy camellias are often given names to go with the season they bloom in such as: Winter Snowman, Winter's Joy, Pink Icicle, Polar Ice, Snow Flurry, Winter's Hope, Winter's Rose, Winter's Star, or Winter's Charm, to name a few. Technically these are considered fall blooming camellias, as they can bloom as early as October, but bloom through February. So really they are winter blooming camellias. The last six were developed through a cold hardy camellia breeding program, hardy to minus 12 degrees. These hybrids are a combination of the cold hardiness of C. oleifera (a small-flowered, fall flowering Chinese species) crossed with the showier species, C. hiemalis or C. sasanqua.
New developments
Camellias fanciers have come up with some varieties that are now fragrant. Unfortunately, Yuletide is not one of them. I just mention this because if fragrance is a requirement for your landscape there are about a dozen varieties out there.
Fragrance comes from a cross of C. lutchuensis, with its distinctive sweet fragrance, with other cultivars with showy flowers.
Even more unusual are yellow camellias. The species C. nitidissima produced the first yellow camellia. There are now about 25 species of yellow.
I like to display camellias indoors floating in a decorative bowl. There are other varieties of camellia better suited for this than Yuletide because of its small two inch blooms, such as C. japonica "Victor Emmanuel" with attractive candy cane pink with red stripes.
So if you want to please someone special, there are lots of holiday plants to do it with.