New Tea Garden, well almost

Yesterday Meg and I visited Camellia Forest Nursery and purchased 5 more camellias. The nursery has 200 different camellias in stock to sell and somewhere around 600 different camellias in all. Very impressive operation indeed.

I recently became interested in camellias for tea! So we picked out two different plants Camellia sinensis 'Korea' and Camellia sinensis var. sinensis 'Small Leaf Tea'. The Korean is considered very cold hardy up to zone 6 and Small Leaf Tea variety is widely cultivated in Japan.


Camellia sinensis Korea This is a medium leaved tea and the plant above is a year old plant. Yes we are starting small.

Below is Camellia sinensis Small Leaf Tea This is a bigger plant and it gets to about 6 ft tall. The fresh new leaves are picked as it grows. These also have small 1 -1 1/2 inch white flowers that are cute. I am known for my special teas so why not give this a try.


Camellia sasanqua 'Tsumaorigasa' a white flower with slightly pink outer edges we bought for the garden. I looked this one up on the web and no other US sources for it other than Camellia Forest Nursery. The other two camellias we bought were Camellia japonica 'April Dawn' and Camellia japonica 'La Peppermint'

So now we have 12 camellias, none very big yet. Many of you might ask how we have room for so many as they do require a lot of space. Our goal is to build a living privacy fence so when the leaves drop of in our woods we do have to look at the neighbors across the way. When I moved here you could walk all around the house and not see any neighbors houses. The 10 acres behind us was woods and is now a small animal hobby farm. We do enjoy the animals but also enjoy the privacy.

Our woods are oaks, poplars and maples and the soil is mostly clay. Not the best conditions for growing camellias as they'd rather be under pines in a more acid soil so we can only hope for the best. Our first 4 camellias have been planted 8 months now and have set buds for flower pretty good, so we are hoping these will do ok.

OK bet a lot of you have had enough camellias. Well here is an hellebore that is starting to bloom. We saw one like it in Duke Gardens last week doing the same thing it was labeled Helleborus argutifolius Corsican Hellebore. I got this plant from a good friend about a month ago.


Today was almost 70 degrees it seemed hot there for a while. We saw a Question Mark butterfly flying about and landing on the leaves and a Autumn Meadowhawk dragonfly over the pond.