alba simplex

I noticed today as I went out to top up the bird table that there were three flowers open on the Camellia japonica 'Alba Simplex'.  That's probably a first.  I'm not very good at writing down what is flowering on each day, or at least I have tried in the past and found it extremely tedious.  And what counts as flowering anyway?  One odd bloom is quite a different thing to a full display.  So I have no record of when the first flower on 'Alba Simplex' was in past years, or whether it has ever flowered as early as Boxing Day, but I know that in the years when we had snow there were no camellia flowers to be seen at all by mid February, and pretty much nothing until March.

I picked one to look at it more closely (and to refer to it while typing this blog post.  You see, I denude my garden for you).  Seen in close up one petal has been slightly marked with brown by last night's frost, but when I first saw the flowers from the viewpoint of the path by the dustbins they looked unblemished.  It has eight petals, two smaller and standing slightly proud inside a ring of six larger ones that are lying almost flat.  I couldn't cut it with any stem at all without sacrificing further buds, so it is sitting in a small dish of water, facing up at the ceiling like a water lily on a pond.

The petals are a brilliant white, at least when seen under the artificial light of the kitchen.  They are thick to the touch, fleshy almost, and reflective with a slightly ruffled surface, especially the two smallest inner petals.  Altogether they look more like wind sculpted snow than a lot of white flower petals do.  They surround a central boss of pale stamens that stand bolt upright like a shaving brush, pale yellow filaments supporting turmeric coloured anthers.  The flower has been very tidy about not shedding pollen on its pristine white petals, but when I experimentally ran a finger tip over the stamens it came away lightly dusted with yellow.

C. japonica 'Alba Simplex' is an old variety.  Hillier's dictionary doesn't give a date, merely describing it as the most proven single white, and the website of the excellent Trehane nursery just describes it as 'historic' (and gives an indicated flowering time of February to March).  A decade-old Telegraph article dates it back to 1816, and an Australian site by somebody I've never heard of (though it looks scholarly enough) gives an introduction date from China (presumably to Australia) of circa 1818.  If this were my Dissertation I'd have to try harder than that to find references, but I'm pretty sure it has been gracing our gardens in the West for a couple of hundred years, and was cultivated in the East before then.

Strangely, for the most proven white, the RHS only lists eleven suppliers in the UK.  Perhaps it is out of fashion.  Maybe people prefer the sugar pinks, or dark sumptuous reds, or perhaps the stark simplicity of an almost single row of petals doesn't compare to modern eyes with the lavish muddled or severely formal doubles.  Or perhaps camellias are out of fashion, and I'd find there were only ten or twelve suppliers for many varieties.  Outside the great Cornish gardens and woodland gardens of the first half of the twentieth century you don't see them used widely nowadays, as the fashion pendulum has swung towards herbaceous plants and grasses.  Maybe their comparatively short flowering season and the slight heaviness of their dark green foliage the rest of the year puts people off.

Actually the leaves of my three camellias look very well, tucked in front of the wood and sheltered by other shrubs, holly, a sprawling Viburnum tinus, an evergreen Berberis, Cotoneaster, and a cut leaved hazel whose hairy, toothed and dull green leaves in summer make it look disconcertingly like a giant woody nettle.  They are solid looking shrubs, the camellias, but their largish leaves catch the light pleasantly.  Some people seem to want everything in the garden to be doing something, all the time, but I quite like a bit of solid green to rest my eyes on from time to time.