Camellia
Camellia japonica
March flowers that a frost can brown overnight — which is the whole reason it belongs out of the early sun.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Red
- Sunlight
- Partial shade, and never where morning sun strikes frosted buds.
- Watering
- Steady moisture through summer; use rainwater where the tap runs hard.
- Feeding
- An ericaceous feed once flowering is over, with an acidic mulch.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- March
- Pruning
- Prune lightly after flowering, and take off the spent blooms.
- Overwintering
- Shelter it from morning sun, and wrap containers when frost is due.
- Mar–Mar Bud Break
- Mar–Apr Flowering
- Apr–Nov Growing
- Nov–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Mar Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 8 ft 2 in
- In-row spacing
- 8 ft 2 in
- Between rows
- 10 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- A fine surface mat, and nothing below it
- Working depth
- 4–12 in
- Can reach
- 18 in down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 8–12 ft across, about 1–1.5× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 16 in of soil
Hair-fine roots in a shallow felt, with no deep anchor to fall back on. It cannot chase water, so it is the first casualty of a drought and the first thing killed by a hoe. Mulch it, never cultivate around it, and never let it go dry in its first two summers.
Shallow, fine and acid-loving, and the plant is set with the top of its root ball proud of the soil rather than level with it. Planted an inch too deep a camellia slowly declines and nobody ever works out why.
The habit is Camellia’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Cats and dogs
- Confirmed safe
We say a plant is safe only where a named poison-control reference names that exact species and records it as non-toxic to both cats and dogs. Most plants are on nobody’s list, and their absence here is not a judgement about them. This is a record of what those references say, not veterinary advice, and it cannot account for your own animal, the quantity eaten, or a plant treated with anything.
The ASPCA files this species under more than one title, Camellia and Common Camellia, each printing our exact Latin name. Also filed as Thea Japonica.
- Scale insects Immobile brown or white bumps fixed to stems and leaf undersides, sucking sap and weakening growth. Wipe off with a damp cloth or dab with horticultural soap; watch for the sooty mold that follows.
- Vine weevil Adults notch leaf edges at night; their plump C-shaped grubs devour roots, especially in containers. Hand-pick adults after dark and water in biological nematodes in late summer.
- Gray mold (botrytis) Petal blight browning the open flowers
- Sooty mold Sooty mold over the leaves
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Beneficial nematodes Steinernema & Heterorhabditis spp.Hunts Vine weevil
Microscopic worms watered onto damp soil that hunt down soil-dwelling grubs and release a bacterium that kills them within days. Timing is the whole thing: warm, damp soil and a small target grub, which means late summer for most of what they are used against.
- Frogs & toads AnuraHunts Vine weevil
A resident toad works the beds every night for slugs, cutworms, and weevils. Recruit them with water — even a sunken basin pond — plus damp shade and an upturned-pot toad house; skip the slug pellets that poison their prey.
- Ground beetle CarabidaeHunts Vine weevil
Fast, glossy night hunters that patrol the soil surface for slugs, cutworms, and root-fly larvae. Give them daytime cover — thick perennial edges, stepping stones, a log — and skip the tillage that wrecks their burrows.
- Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeusHunts Vine weevil
A European animal, and worth saying so plainly: there are no hedgehogs in North America, and the ally that does the same night shift here is the toad, the opossum or the ground beetle. Where they do occur, cut a gap in the fence and skip the pellets.
- Hoverfly SyrphidaeHunts Scale insects
Bee-mimicking flies whose legless larvae graze aphid colonies clean while the adults pollinate. A ribbon of shallow, nectar-rich flowers kept in bloom all season recruits wave after wave of them.
- Ladybird (lady beetle) CoccinellidaeHunts Scale insects
The gardener’s favorite ally: adults and their alligator-shaped larvae each eat thousands of aphids, plus scale, mealybugs, and other soft-bodied sap-suckers. Grow flat, open flowers for the adults and never spray a colony that ladybird larvae are already working.
Rhododendron, Azalea, Pieris, Ferns
Green-leaved shrubs, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com