Tag Archives: Felix Jury camellias

The end of an era

We don’t open the garden to many groups these days but agreed when we were approached to host a visit from “the last Camellia Nationals in their current format”. That is the national conference of the NZ Camellia Society. Competitive show blooms have long been a hallmark of the camellia world, the major focus of the annual conference but a range of garden visits are also included.

A little bit of Taranaki Jury on the honours table of the International Camellia Convention in Dali, China 2016

Mark’s father Felix and his Uncle Les Jury were giants in the camellia scene back in the 1960s and 1970s, earning international reputations and breeding camellias that have become known throughout the world. To this day, Les’s Camellia ‘Jury’s Yellow’ remains a market standard and Felix is probably best remembered for his camellias ‘Dreamboat’ and ‘Waterlily’.

Camellia ‘Waterlily’
Camellia ‘Dreamboat’

When Mark and I returned to Taranaki at the end of 1979, Les was elderly. But before he died in the early 1980s, he was particularly encouraging and generous with advice to Mark, who was taking his own first steps in plant breeding, starting with camellias. Felix didn’t die until 1997 so the camellia influence was strong.

Conferences past. I recently found some homemade posters – I am guessing Mimosa’s work – for a conference that was likely in the 1960s. The flowers have been cut out from magazines and glued on and, unless I am mistaken, the lettering is from Letraset and only oldies will remember the days before accessible printing, let alone photocopy machines!

It was to respect that family connection to camellias that we agreed to the visit last weekend. Times are changing and many horticultural groups are struggling to continue as members die off – literally – and younger generations are not signing up to replace them. That is why this was to be last national camellia show and conference in the current format. I have no idea what new format is planned.

Camellia conferences in days of yore were a little larger and a little different. If the labelling on Mark’s parents’ slides was correct, this seems to be Whakatane 1964.

In times past, the camellia conference was huge. In the heady boom times through until the early 1990s, my recollection is that the conference tours around gardens involved six coaches and countless cars – several hundred people. It was bigger than the rhododendron conference which only required four coaches plus cars. Mark attended several conferences as his parents’ driver and was in awe at the scale of the event and the depth of expertise in the attendees. I went to one – I think it was Whakatane ‘82 and I can date it because I had our first-born with us and she was small. Even back then, Mark and I were a good decade or three younger than most of those who went. We continued to host conference visits here in the times since so last Sunday felt something like the end of an era. Conference attendance was down to 63, so one coach, a minibus and a couple of cars.

The group arrives last Sunday afternoon.
It rained but the camellia enthusiasts were very enthusiastic and appreciative
In earlier times, pretty much every camellia we grew put on a mass display of blooms. These days it is a rarer sight which makes this little row of Mark’s ‘Pearly Cascade’ more special. But even this would have had many more blooms in the days before petal blight.

Of course, camellias have changed over that time, too. Back in those days, camellias were ranked the second largest-selling product line. Roses were top. And the vast majority of camellias being produced were japonicas and hybrids. Camellia petal blight changed everything. The mass display of flowers all over the bush, the efforts Felix and Les both went to in creating varieties that were self-grooming (dropping spent blooms to avoid the need to pick over the plant), the perfection of formal blooms like ‘Dreamboat’, ‘Mimosa Jury’ or ‘Desire’, the purity of bushes with perfect white blooms, the quest for ever larger blooms – these are but distant memories. Petal blight has largely destroyed the displays that made camellias so loved. It made the Camellia Society shows problematic because the blooms no longer stood up to travel and display over several days. Picked as perfect, they too often became blotched with brown by the next morning and sludge the day after.

Camellia Mimosa Jury’

We still have hundreds of camellias here in our garden and right across our property. I set out to pick one off each bush where I could reach a flower and gave up after covering just a fraction of the garden. A few are named varieties but many are just seedlings from the breeding programme.

I think of camellias like the cast of a stage-show musical. In times gone by, the entire front row of the chorus and some significant soloists were camellias. Nowadays, they play a valuable but less acclaimed role, filling out the back rows of the chorus with a few of them getting to step forward to sing a few solo lines from time to time. They used to be grown primarily for their flowers. Now we value them more for their potential form – we clip and shape key specimens – as well as their obligingly resilient and healthy nature and their adaptability.

We use camellias differently now. The undulating hedge in the foreground is Camellia microphylla. The clipped hedge running across the middle of the photograph is Mark’s Camellia ‘Fairy Blush’. The two white topped lower plants in front of it are Camellia yuhsienensis.
I set up a few sprays of Camellia nitidissima on the table by the visitor loos because I thought the visitors might not be accustomed to seeing them growing outdoors as garden plants – but nobody commented on them, to me at least. At the time when Les and Felix were breeding camellias, nobody in the west even knew about the yellow camellias in China and Vietnam. Les created ‘Jury’s Yellow’ from white camellias.