A camellia challenge

Last March I was lucky enough to visit the Kunming Institute of Botany in Yunnan Province, where I met camellia expert Feng Baojun and was shown some of the rare and beautiful golden camellia species that his institute was researching.

Most of the 200 to 300 camellias discovered to date were found in south-west China, including the tea plant, C. sinensis and the ornamentals best known in cultivation: winter-flowering C. sasanqua, the large, ruffled flowered C. reticulata and C. japonica.

Their flower colour is limited to the red and white end of the colour spectrum. None are blue, but in the 1960s a true yellow camellia was discovered in Guangxi Province, near the Vietnamese border.

This was C. nitidissima (formerly C. chrysantha). Its five-centimetre flowers somewhat resemble large buttercups, pale yellow with bright gold stamens, appearing among bronze leaf buds that unfold into leathery, deeply veined leaves.

It has long been available to gardeners but few grow it, which is why I had never seen one. It needs dense, damp shade and may take up to eight years to flower in cultivation.

Mr Feng's job includes research into ornamental and commercial plants and through the years the Kunming Institute has given special attention to yellow flowering camellias.

It was exciting to learn new species awre still being discovered in southern China and neighbouring Vietnam, and Mr Feng showed me several beauties, including C. impressinervis, which had slightly larger flowers than C. nitidissima, with unusual pointy petals.

The Kunming Institute's extensive yellow camellia breeding program uses C. reticulata, C. japonica and the lesser-known C. pitardii as female parents, pollinated by three yellow flowered species, including the two above.

Introducing new plants into cultivation is a slow process but one day we should be lucky enough to find pure gold camellias readily available in nurseries and garden centres.

I would love to grow camellias.

Although I have a couple in pots, they dislike the dry, sunny summers of the Central Tablelands.

Their natural habitat is damp woodland and while it's (just) possible to recreate this with costly in-ground watering systems and mistifier sprays, you're fighting nature, not an opponent I care to take on.

However, not all gardeners are so timid and in theory you can grow anything if you're prepared to go to the trouble, as anybody who visits, say, the tropical rainforest gully in the National Botanic Gardens during a freezing Canberra winter will see.

We all love a challenge and few of us limit our gardens to what comes naturally.

Also - go on, admit it - once we've succeeded with something we want to move on, hence the continual hankering after the new and challenging.

Early in our married life Bill and I had some beautiful camellias.

We lived in Sydney and our small front garden included a two-metre high hedge of white C.japonica.

It contained half a dozen different varieties and flowered continually from mid-winter into spring.

Camellias revel in the warm humidity of the NSW coast and hinterland. If I lived in the right climate I would plant as many as I could, as they are among the loveliest shrubs in the world with lustrous, evergreen leaves and a vast array of single, double, speckled and striped flowers.

However, I still believe the best gardens are those where the owner finds out what flourishes and grows lots of it.

But that doesn't stop me longing for a yellow camellia.