By ABBIE JURY

I am still “doing” my containers here and this has kept my mind on camellias.

The camellia is viewed somewhat as a utility plant in this country but is far more highly prized overseas. In Switzerland and Italy we saw little plants of pretty ordinary varieties in 1.4 litre pots (that is the small grade you often see in The Warehouse) selling for the equivalent of $NZ60! In the UK, much of which is too cold to use the camellia outdoors all year, they are often grown in containers and moved under cover for winter.

We arrived in Italy the week after the International Camellia Congress had been through the same area and the camellias were looking splendid. Almost without exception they were the larger-flowered japonica types (they are the ones that are often described in this country as the old-fashioned type) and often on very large shrubs.

In their climate, they get a mass flowering that we rarely see here. The winter is so cold and dry that the plants go dormant. With the advent of spring rains and a warming in temperature, the camellias spring into action and cover the bush in flowers. A few weeks and they are over, so they fit a similar garden niche to magnolias and flowering cherries as a relatively short-lived seasonal floral display.

I noticed they suffered from camellia petal blight there, too. A few years ago it was largely limited to the west coast of the United States. Now it is global.

We, too, have camellia petal blight but not the short-lived, mass-flowering. We have had camellias blooming since the beginning of April and we will continue to have flowers until as late as November. That is eight months. Not all on the same bush, I might say. But as a well-behaved flowering backbone to the garden, the camellia has few rivals. And most are tough. Roundup doesn’t touch them, so you can, if you must, spray all around the base of them. If you cut them off to the ground, many will still shoot away and start again.

If you have a really tatty, yellow, old specimen, you can try this kill-or-cure approach to rejuvenation. But make sure you feed it and mulch it when it starts to shoot again or you will just get a tatty, yellow, young specimen instead. The yellow leaves may be due to the variety (some of the japonicas go yellow in full sun) or it may be due to starvation and hard conditions.

Over the years, Mark has commented often that he finds it difficult to know how to feature camellia plants in the garden. It is only as we have started to develop more skills in clipping and shaping that we have been able to feature individual plants better. Otherwise, they tend to be consigned to a supportive role in hedgerows or as background fillers.

As many are quite dense plants with good foliage, they are useful as background fillers or hedging. But some will grow quite large and need something done with them or they will become large, boring fillers with dead twiggy growth in the middle.

You have about four choices with a large old camellia:

• Limb it up to form a canopy (by limbing up, I mean take off all the
  lower growth) and underplant with something else to add interest.
• Cut back very hard and hope it will rejuvenate and spring into fresh
  growth from low down, giving the impression of a fresh, young plant.
• Thin it out so it is not as dense and you can see the skeleton of the
  branch structure (many books will tell you that a camellia should be
  pruned so that a bird can fly through it. Whether we are talking a
  finch or a kereru is never specified).
• Or clip and shape it in the topiary style.

We almost never take option two but we do a lot of options one, three and four. That is because we like to make the most of maturity in the plants and to find the character of the plant, rather than striving to recover the juvenile charm of a young plant.

Camellias are a bit like roses in that there are many named varieties and many that look very similar. And there are a great deal more named than are ever produced commercially – the range changes regularly.

Unless you are single-minded about one particular named hybrid, there will usually be a similar one that you can find. You can spend a great deal of time and make many phone calls to try to seek out a plant, only to draw a blank and find that nobody is producing it. If it is not being produced any longer, then odds on it was either a lousy nursery plant or it has been superseded by a better selection or there was simply no demand for it.

Potting my feature camellias into containers has focused my mind on my motley collection of such receptacles. It is not that long ago that containers were relatively expensive and not widely available. The flood of cheap Asian imports suddenly overwhelmed us with choice and, no doubt along with many readers, I bought pots on special or was charmed enough to hand over money for pots that looked different.

The result is not pleasing. Now I am starting to streamline and I have vowed not to get the Araldite out to reglue broken pots that I no longer like. I have to overcome my frugal background and still find it difficult to consign them to the rubbish, but truly, they are so cheap now that it makes little sense to continue with those I dislike.

My blue pots went first. They stuck out like sore thumbs in the garden. Now I have decided that all the glazed, coloured pots and worse, the patterned pots, will have to be phased out. If I can’t afford beautiful Burelli pots, which are features in themselves, I can at least dispense with the pots that shout, “Look at me! Look at me!” in Kath and Kim style. I want to look at the plant, not the gaudy pot, so the rejected pots are being moved closer to the utility service areas and I will only have terracotta (which ages gracefully), stone and neutral hypertufa in the garden itself.

Each to their own. I know many of you favour bright glazed and patterned pots. I see you shopping in the same places I shop and when I am reaching for dusty terracotta, you are buying blue pots, or blue willow pattern, green bamboo pattern or burgundy. Life would indeed be dull if we all liked the same things. *

*Abbie and Mark Jury have a garden and nursery at Otaraoa Rd, Tikorangi.