Camellia, the black-tie bloom

I knew camellias spoke the language of romance long before I saw Greta Garbo in “Camille” pin one last perfect blossom to her waist. My fascination with these flowers began when I was in the sixth grade. I was at a friend’s house one evening when a small white florist’s box was delivered to the door. At the same moment my friend’s older sister -- usually our impatient, bluejeaned baby-sitter -- appeared at the top of the stairs in a haze of pink chiffon. My friend and I raced to bring her the box, dying to see what lay within. Carefully she peeled back the folds of waxed green tissue and drew out a single blush camellia, as symmetrical as if we’d drawn it with our compasses. As she slipped the corsage, mounted on silver elastic, over her wrist, I was certain that if only I had such a magical flower to wear, I, too, would be able to fill out a strapless gown and dance confidently in heels.

Here in Los Angeles we’re as apt to encounter camellias growing outside our bank branch as adorning a ballroom. Indeed, to say these Asian natives thrive in our mild winters is an understatement. One camellia on the grounds of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens has been there since before Henry Huntington bought the property -- and that was in 1903.

The Huntington’s camellia garden illustrates on a grand scale one reason Californians love these plants: Few others can lend such a formal air to a lawn. Partly it’s their evergreen leaves, so glossy that the garden looks as though it’s just been polished -- even in summer when the shrubs are out of bloom. And when they are in flower, the elaborately constructed blossoms are so perfectly set off by the dark foliage that the most elegant rose looks almost shabby by comparison.

Of course, to talk about a camellia “shrub” can be misleading: There are plants in older neighborhoods from Altadena to Los Feliz that remind us of camellias’ other, wilder side. (In China they grow as mountain trees.) These are the antithesis of formal. Easily reaching 20 feet, they block the light from second-story windows and turn side yards into tangled, mysterious groves.

January and February are the prime blooming months for most of the camellia varieties grown in our region. Perhaps the best place to see both faces of this complex beauty -- the polite and the untamed -- is Descanso Gardens in La Canada, where newspaper publisher E. Manchester Boddy began planting camellias in the late 1930s. Today the 20 acres of old-growth oaks that he chose to shade his plantings are home to 35,000 plants.

My first stop, however, on a visit to Descanso in early January is not this enchanted forest, but a vault-roofed meeting room where I find 20 men and women from the Southern California Camellia Society whose passion for these flowers makes mine look like a schoolgirl crush.

Outside it’s pouring rain. Inside the room, however, there’s a rosy glow. It comes from close to 100 individual camellia blossoms filling a long table, each sitting perkily in a plastic exhibitor’s cup. As I will soon learn at this Judges Symposium and Exhibitor’s School, the height of these cups is strictly regulated -- as is almost everything else in a camellia show, including the size a flower is allowed to be, and the number of leaves that can be shown with each blossom. What I will also learn is that here in the seemingly genteel world of horticultural exhibitions, just as in the rougher world of political campaigns, rules are made to be broken.

How devoted are these camellia lovers? I hear one older man apologize that health problems have forced him to hire a helper to lug fertilizer to his bushes. At first, though, it’s hard to pay attention to the people because I’m so ravished by the flowers. Many are more than 5 inches in diameter. Others seem to have been dip-dyed through successive shades of rose. And one tiered beauty sits nearly 4 inches high, looking like a shell-pink prom gown.

How, I wonder, did so many different shapes -- here a peony, there a wild rose -- come from a single species? The answer to that question, as comments made by these enthusiasts suggest, lies not only in gardeners’ irrepressible urge to improve upon nature, but in the camellia’s own genetic exuberance, which often leads to different-shaped flowers on a single plant.

These shapes were already being codified in Europe in the 1800s. Today most lists recognize six basic forms of the Camellia japonica, including “single,” whose six or seven petals surround a visible brush of yellow stamens; “formal-double,” a symmetrical mound that completely hides the stamens; and “anemone,” which features a central cluster of small upright “petaloids” sitting like a pompom on a wide-petaled plate.

How a flower exemplifies its form, I quickly learn as the symposium begins, is an important principle of show judging. A formal-double that lies flat -- however much it seems to recall the rose window at Notre Dame -- loses points. “Every petal,” Marilee Gray, a past president of the society, instructs, “should have lift and definition.” For a second I wonder if we’re talking about a flower or Mr. Universe.

Color is also an area where I’ll have to retool my tastes. Pure white varieties like my favorite ‘Nuccio’s Gem’ are unlikely to win blue ribbons. Judges succumb to regional preferences like anyone else, we’re told, and in Southern California, brilliant colors are king. In the midst of all this flower power, it’s ironic to remember that camellias in their native China and Japan were first grown strictly for their leaves and seeds. (The latter were a source of oil.) The species now covering these tables, C. japonica and the larger C. reticulata, were first described by Western writers at the end of the 17th century. That they made their way to Europe, however, was due as much to botanical ignorance as to a proper appreciation of their charms.

In the 1700s the dried leaves of the Chinese shrub Camellia sinensis -- more familiar to us as tea -- were commanding steep prices. Tea drinking had become a Western passion, and China carefully maintained its monopoly on its biggest cash crop by restricting foreign traders’ movements and purchases. Therefore one importer, a director of the Swedish East India Company, was elated to be sailing home with two healthy specimens of the valuable Chinese tree.

As he delivered them to the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the director may have thought he was paving the way for legions of Western tea planters. When the trees flowered, however, it was clear that he had been snookered. Instead of the tiny cupped blooms of the tea plant, the trees bore the showy ones of its japonica cousin.

Back in Descanso’s meeting room, “showy” is taking on new meaning. It’s the job of camellia judge and frequent prizewinner Elsie Bracci to teach us how to prepare our superstar blooms for their competition close-ups. The parallels with human beauty pageants are irresistible as she displays her “show kit,” which includes Q-tips for encouraging petal lift and a soft makeup brush for removing specks of dirt and lint. “Camellias are pretty resilient,” she assures us, then gently plunges her fingers into the heart of a blossom and tousles it to a brisker stance, careful all the while not to bruise the petals with her nails.

After the anxious work of choosing and cutting blooms (morning is best); packing them in solution-filled cups (sugar water is fine); nestling the cups in plastic sweater boxes lined with polyester fiberfill (the kind used to stuff pillows); and shepherding the boxes onto an airplane if it’s a faraway show, the sight of an imperfection on an otherwise crackerjack contender can bring a crisis of indecision. Bracci’s advice is clear: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” The tweezers in her kit will take care of the “little petaloid that’s come up where it shouldn’t be”; scissors and a steady hand can reshape a brown-creased petal so that it’s flawless again.

But what if the browning is due to camellia petal blight, an audience member asks. (That’s an ugly, fast-spreading fungus that gets your prized beauty thrown straight out of the competition.) In this company, where judges are also contenders, there’s still no hesitation. Bracci sums up with a principle I have often subscribed to, as both a gardener and a romantic: If something looks perfect, it is.

Still, when the lunch break comes, I can’t help eyeing the camellia table a little more closely. That high pink prom dress of a flower that I’m so taken with -- isn’t the cup it’s sitting in higher than the rest? More like the ones permitted in Northern California shows, but banned here? I can’t be sure, but then I don’t really want to be.

Experts disagree on exactly when the first camellias came to the United States, but it was not long after the Revolutionary War. By the early 1800s these floral prima donnas were being competitively bred in greenhouses from Boston to Charleston and being given names like ‘George Washington’ and ‘Jeffersoni’ (for Thomas Jefferson). One participant in this horticultural fervor, Yankee seed store owner Col. James Lafayette Warren, arrived in Sacramento, drawn by the Gold Rush. In 1852 he imported California’s first camellia seeds. It took a few decades for the plants to wend their way south, but by the late 1880s they’d made themselves at home in the San Gabriel Valley.

Just what “home” means to a camellia is quickly apparent as you follow the main path from Descanso’s center circle toward the Japanese teahouse. This is no shrub-lined salon but an arboreal fairyland. Trees 20 and 30 feet high, some blossoming from head to toe, form wide avenues and narrow lanes. The ground between them is covered with a nut-brown layer of dead leaves, both pleasant to walk on and important as mulch. High above, the gnarled branches of the oaks that protect the camellia leaves from burning in the summer form a tracery against the sky.

Flowers are everywhere: Fat red-and-white-striped ‘Gigantea’ dangles above your head. A branch, not quite broken, but bent and laden with tangle-petaled ‘Duchesse de Caze,’ sweeps the path at your feet. Even fallen camellias hold their shape, forming pink and red circular carpets that light up distant vistas and make a somber grove seem like an exotic outdoor pavilion. But color comes from other sources too. I’m surprised to discover a stand of ‘Ave Maria’ whose trunks have a green-gold hue.

The illusion of this forest as a natural wonder is carefully maintained. That we can see the trunks of ‘Ave Maria’ at all is due to the artful pruning that’s removed branches below head height. Paths in the East Forest wind across different levels of the hillside, ensuring that we can look down on certain groups of trees and appreciate the bloom that clusters on the higher, sun-reaching branches. Every so often, too, the dark green avenues are interrupted by a well-chosen contrast -- a chartreuse tree fern, a blue-needled evergreen.

Descanso’s collection reaffirms what I know from my own gardening: Far from being the fragile hothouse creatures I first imagined, here they are hard-headed beauties, rather like Camille herself.

Tough and adaptable, camellias seem to enjoy what’s worst about our growing conditions. They settle comfortably in that bane of Los Angeles yards: dry shade. Their roots compete scrappily with those of our largest trees. I have even heard rumors of a study that suggests camellias grow better in smog.

And yet familiarity only breeds more enchantment. I know that if I saw a bush of those pink prom dress flowers for sale, I would snap it up in an instant. I know that I have no room for it. I know that, under my casual care, the flowers are unlikely to reach the size that so impressed me. It doesn’t matter. I’m buying an illusion. Gardeners -- and romantics -- do that.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Where camellias run the show

The Descanso and Huntington gardens are celebrating the flowers at their seasonal peak with talks, shows and sales running through February.

DESCANSO GARDENS

Camellia Forest Tours: 2 p.m. Sunday; 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 26; noon Sunday, Feb. 27. Camellia horticulturist Wayne Walker leads the tours.

Southern California

Camellia Society

Flower Show and Sale: 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. See beautiful plants, chat with experts and choose camellias for your home.

Camellia Festival 2005: February will be alive with more than 40,000 camellia plants growing throughout 20 acres. The Camellia Forest is recognized as an “International Camellia Garden of Excellence” by the International Camellia Society. The flower shows, talks, walks and plant sales will lead to Descanso’s annual Camellia Festival from Feb. 24 through 27. All festival events are free to members and free with garden admission. 1418 Descanso Drive, La Canada; (818) 949-4200; www.descanso.com.

THE HUNTINGTON

More than 1,000 camellia blooms will compete for honors Feb. 12 and 13, during the 32nd Annual Camellia Show at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The event is cosponsored by the Southern California Camellia Society. Hours are 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. both days in Friends’ Hall. In addition to flowers on exhibit in the show, more than 10 acres of camellias are blooming in the Huntington’s Japanese Garden and North Vista areas. 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; (626) 405-2100; www.huntington.org.