SAZANKA

This month The International Camellia Society put two of my camellia photo pictures to the front page of their website. One is a picture of Camellia japonica ‘Kamo Honnami’ (see their website), and another is a picture of Camellia grijsii, a species related to C. sasanqua:

C. grijsii

Camellia grijsii (长瓣短柱茶 in Chinese) Hance (1879) is a wild species of section Paracamellia. It is related to C. sasanqua, C. oleifera and C. kissii. It was collected in 1861 in Fujian by C.F.M. de Grijs. It is distributed in China (Fujian, Hubei, Sichuan, Guangxi) and used for a high-quality oil production. C. grijsii is closely related to another species - C. yuhsienensis, that is a parent of a popular cultivar ‘Yume’.

I got my two plants of C. grijsii from Nuccio’s Nurseries. The first one (shown above) has single white flowers and the second one is a double-flowered Chinese cultivar called ‘Zhenzhucha’:

Camellia grijsii ‘Zhenzhucha’

Camellia grijsii has great hybridizing potential. Two plants in my garden have small leaves with impressed veins and very columnar shape. I believe there are also varieties with larger leaves, but I am specifically interested in small-leaved cultivars.

Another great feature of C. grijsii is its cluster-flowering habit. However in my garden C. grijsii flowers from January to March, so it will be a challenge to cross it with Fall-flowering sasanquas. Probably I will have to store some pollen from sasanquas in refrigerator for a couple of months.

Another problem is chromosome number. According to Kondo and his associates it has a variety of chromosome numbers 2n = 30, 60, 75 and 90 (see the reference in Collected Species of the Genus Camellia, an Illustrated Outline by Gao Jiyin, Clifford R. Parks and Du Yuequiang).
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By foliage this cultivar is similar to ‘Jewel Box’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’. The habit is columnar and resembles ‘Slim’N'Trim’ and C. grijsii. The flower resembles C. grigsii species. A description from 2006-2007 Nuccio’s catalog:

STARRY PILLAR (N#9820) - Small single white, occasional tint of pink on edge and on bud. Small dark green foliage. Medium growing, columnar habit. (There are several features of this chance seedling that lead us to believe it may well be a Sasanqua-Tenuiflora hybrid.)
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Today the newspaper San Francisco Chronicle published my photo picture of the Camellia hybrid ‘Yuletide’. The photo appeared in as an illustration to an article written by Demetra Bowles Lathrop. The name of the article is “Happy blooming New Year! Camellias, hellebores, winter hazel can brighten desolate Bay Area gardens” and it appeared in the gardening section.

You can get the article from the newspaper’s website: http://tinyurl.com/6clpca

Сегодня, 10-го января, газета Сан-Франциско Кроникл напечатала мою фотографии камелии ‘Юлетайд’. Фотография иллюстрирует статью журналистки Деми Латроп про растения, цветущие в области Сан-Францисского залива во время Нового Года.

Yuletide. C. x vernalis. Originated by Nuccio’s Nurseries, California in 1963. A seedling of ‘Hiryu’.
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