In the Garden
Ready for Their Cold Snap
Carolyn Walker
Camellias were once thought of
as darlings of the Southern garden, but hardier varieties are making
their way north. Here, the shockingly pink Autumn Spirit. More Photos »
I’M not just a bark man,” Charles Cresson said this month, as we stood
by one of his towering camellias, covered with deep red blooms. “I’ve
always loved winter flowers.”
And maybe he loves camellias the most. Their blooms, from white or pink
to deep red, some as simple as a wild rose, others as full blown as a
peony, are set against glossy dark green leaves. They have the same
startling color as those white roses painted red for the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland.”
Mr. Cresson, 58, grows about 60 kinds of hardy camellias in his two-acre
garden here, a vestige of a family estate that goes back three
generations. He has spent his life as a horticulturist, working in
public gardens, teaching and writing about gardening — and breeding
camellias.
These woody plants, which can be rounded shrubs or rangy 20-foot trees,
grow wild in Asia, from the cool Himalayas down to the subtropics. When
they first caught on in America in the 1800s, they were thought of as
hothouse bloomers or the darlings of the Southern garden. But now, after
decades of breeding with species from South Korea and Japan, hardier
varieties are making their way north.
Mr. Cresson’s garden, for example, lies in U.S.D.A. Hardiness Zone
6b, where winter temperatures can fall to 5 below zero. New York City,
Long Island and southern New Jersey are a slightly warmer Zones 7a and
7b, where they can dip to zero.
Planting Fields Arboretum in Oyster Bay, N.Y., has about 100 hardy
camellias flourishing around its Camellia Greenhouse, where several
hundred less-hardy varieties bloom under glass. Many of the hardy
camellias there are survivors of crosses made in the 1960s by Clifford
R. Parks, a renowned breeder who developed many spring-blooming
varieties and farmed them out to public gardens to test their ability to
thrive in different regions.
Perhaps the hardiest known camellia available is Korean Fire, a
selection made from plants grown from seed collected by Barry Yinger, an
intrepid plant explorer, on the islands off the Korean coast in the
early 1980s.
On the phone from his farm near York, Pa., Mr. Yinger recalled: “The
islands were military outposts, and there was no legitimate way to go.
We bribed our way onto a military ferry and supply boat.”
Mr. Yinger, who has many plants grown from seed, added, “The camellias here have gone through minus 28 Fahrenheit.”
Korean Fire has beautiful evergreen foliage and funnel-shaped deep red
flowers, with yellow stamens that open in April and early May.
Down in South Carolina and Georgia, camellias will bloom from fall
straight through winter to spring. But farther north, fall-blooming
varieties start flowering in October, peak in November and continue only
through December. A few hang on through January, if winter is mild.
Some spring-blooming camellias start to flower in late February; others
open in April and flower through May.
MR. CRESSON, who has been gardening since he was in first grade, fell in
love with camellias in the 1960s, when warm winters allowed a
neighbor’s to bloom like mad, with “big pink blooms, four inches wide,
hanging all over them,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, you can’t have
anything more beautiful than this.’ ”
By his teens, he was growing his own camellias, many from cuttings of
the hardiest species and varieties known at the time. He was also
visiting the test sites at Longwood Gardens, near Philadelphia, which
later worked with Mr. Parks on spring-bloomers, and the National
Arboretum, where William L. Ackerman developed many hardy fall-blooming
varieties.
He pointed to a bank of tall, handsome shrubs on the edge of his yard
with a few single pink flowers still on them. “Ackerman sent me about 40
seedlings to trial in the mid-’80s, but not all were winter-hardy,
which was the point,” he said. “About eight did well.”
Mr. Cresson has a degree in horticulture from the University of Vermont,
and he has interned at some of the world’s most spectacular gardens:
Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society garden in Surrey, England;
Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium; and Longwood Gardens. He has also worked
at the best public gardens around here, including Winterthur and
Chanticleer. So when he talks about camellias — or any other plant, for
that matter — I pay attention.
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