Our Camellias - Autumn/Winter 2016

We collected a few camellias of varying sizes and they put on a beautiful show this winter. So there are going to be a lot of photos in this post!

The first one to flower was our Camellia sasanqua Paradise Caroline. 

Here's one of the flowers just starting to open. Paradise Caroline produces a deep pink, informal double flowers, a bit more on the small side.

Very beautiful, almost peony-form flowers. Flowers last a few days after blooming before slowly losing petals. The good thing is that the buds bloomed in a staggered fashion so there was always some colour on the tree. This one started blooming in April all the way to July.

This is one of the last blooms produced, a really massive, many-petaled camellia!

We also had some very young camellias, and this one is Camellia sasanqua Something Special, a white and pink semi-double. This one is larger than Paradise Caroline and dwarfed the plant itself when it produced a single bloom at the end of May.

Unfortunately we had some very wet weather at the time and the flower did not last very long. Hopefully it will do better next year.

Another more advanced plant was this Camellia sasanqua Fairy Wand. We purchased this early in autumn and there were already plenty of buds, but this variety only started flowering in late July.

As the name suggests, it produces small dark pink flowers in a semi-double form.

Extremely prolific flowering, the tree was just covered in blooms. Compared to Paradise Caroline, Fairy Wand loses its blooms whole and the ground beneath the plant was equally covered in dropped flowers.

You can see how many blooms there were on each stem, with plenty more buds waiting to flower. It has continued to flower up to the end of winter.

Finally, a strange result. This is meant to be Camellia sasanqua Jennifer Susan - a soft pink semi-double. Somehow when it bloomed in early August, it was a white single. We'll see what happens next year.