Albert's Greenhouse

For the life of my I cannot understand why it is, but there seem to be only two types of landscaping Camelia in the Bay Area. My old house in San Jose had both types, a beautiful single red one in the front, and a gaudy pink stripey one in the back. My new house in Sunnyvale, being a more modern structure, only has the pink stripey one.

Both pink stripey camelias I've owned - and I'm not that enamored of them in the first place - have suffered massively from camelia flower blight, a fungal infection that renders the flowers brown and ugly even as they are just opening.

It's strangely difficult to find good advice on combatting this disease. Apparently, the disease lives in the mulch and soil at the base of the camelia. Spores float up to the blossoms, cause their rot, and the blossoms fall back to the base of the camelia, thus completing the cycle. Most books and websites seem to trumpet the advice that one should simply pick up the dropped flowers and dispose of them, thus breaking the lifecycle. In my experience, this is futile at best. Since the blossoms die so quickly after they appear, you have to be out there at least once a day, rain or shine, picking off browning blossoms. Even if you manage to do this, the disease is still not well controlled.





More drastic, and possibly chemical, action is needed.

Some places advise replacing the mulch at the base of the camelia just before the flowers open. Others advise a more drastic option of a fungicidal soil drench and foliar sprays. I'm planning to go for broke next year and do the spraying, the drenching, the mulch replacement and the flower picking, and see if I can't beat this.

Camelias are interesting flowers that seem to do well in the Bay Area, other than the flower blight issue. I know that they do not tolerate freezes well, but in the mild climate that we have, they are often the earliest flowers of the spring. Their season is long, given a little irrigation they deal okay with our hot, dry summers, and they provide nice foliage interest all year round. If I can beat the blight, I would like to grow a few more, less common, types. And that single red one as well.