The view from Eudora Welty's window

One of three reconstructed arbors marks the passage from the porch space to the upper garden behind the house. Between a curving border and a cutting garden, a rebuilt arbor for climbing roses frames the lower garden and its bed of early hybrid tea and old garden roses. Beyond the lower garden, backed by a bamboo thicket, lies the woodland garden, where the reconstructed clubhouse stands. Welty once quipped that she retreated here to "privately edit the Radio News and chew gum," while working for a local radio station in the 1930s.

For Eudora Welty, the garden itself became a private sanctuary, even a place of transformation. She once wrote to her agent, Russell, "Every evening when the sun is going down and it is cool enough to water the garden, and it is all quiet except for the locusts in great waves of sound, and I stand still in one place for a long time putting water on the plants, I feel something new – that is all I can say – as if my will went out of me, as if I had a stubbornness and it was melting."

Japanese camellia ( Camellia japonica) is one of the stars of southern gardens. Native to Japan and China, this woody plant with brown bark and lustrous, dark evergreen leaves grows in a dense pyramid 10 to 25 feet high and 6 to 10 feet wide. According to common wisdom, a properly pruned camellia has enough space between branches so that a bird can fly through, giving it the open habit of a Japanese maple. Gardeners prize the flowers, which can grow up to three to five inches across in a number of double- and single-petaled forms described in comparison to flowers of other species – rose, anemone, peony, and so forth. Blossoms are red, pink, cream, or white.

The Japanese camellia's smaller cousin, Camellia sasanqua, also makes a striking garden plant, with finer foliage and smaller blossoms than C. japonica. While all camellias thrive in slightly acid soil, C. sasanqua requires full sun, poor soil, and blooms in the fall. C. japonica prefers filtered light and well-drained soil. As for pests, the species is subject to scale and mites, which experienced growers claim are easily remedied.

Cultivars are usually classified as early-, mid-, and late-season bloomers. Until recently, the "season" in the United States was defined as the fall and winter in hardiness zones 7 to 9, or from October through April or May in southern states. But Tom Johnson, horticulturist for the American Camellia Society in Fort Valley, Ga., reports that new hybrids can tolerate winters in zone 6 (if planted in a protected spot), with even hardier hybrids likely. "These new, cold-hardy camellias have survived to minus 10 degrees F.," he says. The hybrids derive from the fall-blooming tea-oil camellia ( Camellia olifera), which prefers well-drained soil and filtered light.

All camellias belong to the tea family (Theaceae) and C. sinensis produces the leaves used in tea consumed as a beverage. According to Mr. Johnson, this shared ancestry accounts for the garden camellia's introduction to the West in the 18th century, at least anecdotally. "The English were buying tea from India, then they decided to buy the actual tea plants, thinking to save the shipping costs," Johnson says. "Indian merchants outsmarted them by selling them an entire boatload of Camellia japonica."

• For more information, contact the American Camellia Society at:

Massee Lane Gardens
100 Massee Lane
Fort Valley, GA 31030
(478) 967-2358

www.camellias-acs.org

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