First Flower for this year

Today I spied our first camellia flower for this year it is called “Sasanqua Something Special” which is a largesingle white flower shading to bright pink at the edge of the petals.

We planted this lovely camellia over the grave of my beloved chow dog Cassin, for to me he was something special.

At first I was not so keen on Sasanqua’s but as our collection grew I started to like them more. They had a few advantages over the japonicas (which needed semi shade) these could grow in full sun. They also were fast growing and bloomed a lot earlier, so having different varieties meant we had flowers in our garden for a longer time. So now we have a lot of sasanquas in our collection.

When our children were born we planted a camellia to commemorate the day. For my daughter it was “Japonica Susan Stone” a delicate pale pink formal double, and for our son it was “Sasanqua

Mine-No-Yuki” a white semi double peony flower. They are both growing remarkably well and just like our two children my son’s plant is a lot taller than my daughter’s.

  

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Searching out other Nurseries.

So starting the next weekend now armed with the catalog we had acquired from Camellia Grove in which we marked all the camellias we would like to obtain. We set out in search of other nurseries that sold our precious flowers hopefully much cheaper than the last one.
The first ones we tried were “The Three Bears” at Pennant Hills, Hargraves & Swane’s at Dural. They all had a good collection of the three well known species to choose from, which are Japonica (this was my favorite), Sasanqua, and; Reticulata, and where cheaper than the Grove.

We made a few additions to our collection the first weekend one of which was Dahlohnega a beautiful white with a cream yellow tinge formal double bloom. (photo above)

And so our collection grew.

When we first started growing Camellias

Max my husband &  I started growing camellias in 1974. We already had a few large ones in our garden but we wanted more. That is where the obsession started.

Max knew of a few nurserys that grew camellias so seeing it was camellia season we thought we would go look at a few.

The first one we went to was called "Camellia Grove" which was at St Ives. 

Big  Mistake because of this place we really fell in love with these wondeful flowers for here there was so many  different colours shapes and sizes we didn't know which ones we wanted. "Camellia Grove  was one of the dearest nurserys ( so we found out), but I really fell in love with one called "Button N Bows" (photo above). Our collection had started.