Last Surviving Plant Gets New Lease on Life

A rare, 210-year-old camellia will live on, now that the Middleton Place garden manager has figured out how to preserve it.

After 15 years of trying, Sidney Charles Frazier has propagated the former plantation’s oldest surviving camellia plant, thought to be the only one of its kind in the United States.

Frazier used air-layering to produce a new but genetically identical plant from the last remaining original Michaux camellia, introduced to Middleton Place and to Gov. Henry Middleton by French botanist Andre Michaux around 1786.

Three of the original plants have died. Only the ailing 8-foot-tall parent plant, one-third its former size, still stands.

The air-layering process involves carefully removing a section of bark, wrapping the cut tightly with wet moss, surrounding it with plastic and waiting.

For years, Frazier’s attempts failed, until an expert advised him to stop using pesticides.

The National Historic Landmark garden now is almost completely free of chemicals. Instead, Frazier uses organic controls such as insects, which include 72,000 pest-eating ladybugs released last spring and 48 million beneficial nematodes in the summer.