The Chinese Species of Camellia in CultivationBruce Bartholomew

Though new camellias have been introduced to the West from China for 250years, only a quarter of the known species are yet cultivated here

Chma is the origin of many cultivated plantsthat now are grown throughout the world.Some of them, such as the peonies, chrysan-themum, wintersweet, and osmanthus, tra-ditionally were grown in Chinese gardens. Inmost cases these Chinese garden plants start-ed being brought into cultivation in the Westin the Eighteenth Century, and the earliestintroductions of live plants from China weremostly restricted to garden plants. Anotherand far-richer source of cultivated plants hasbeen the indigenous flora of China, particu-larly of the mountains of southwestern China.These wild plants were brought mto culti-vation from the late Nineteenth Centurythrough to the present, after Western collec-tors and, more recently, Chinese collectors,started exploring the riches of the Chineseflora.The genus Camellia includes species in

both of these categories; thus, the history ofthe introduction of Camellia species intoWestern gardens spans the period from thefirst half of the Eighteenth Century up to thepresent. Even with this long history, onlyabout one in four of the currently recognizedspecies is in cultivation in the West, or evenin Chinese botanical gardens.

Opposite~ Camellia euryoides as depicted m Loddiges’sBotanical Cabinet m 1832 This small, white-floweredcamelha was unknown m the mld for over a centuryafter it was descnbed from cultmated matenal.

Camellia is basically a Chinese genus,some nine out of ten of its species beingendemic to China. Its main center of speciesdiversity straddles the Tropic of Canceracross southern China. Diversity drops rap-idly to the south and more gradually to thenorth. Although most of its species are con-tinental, the genus extends to the islands ofJapan, Taiwan, and Hainan, one species,Camellia lanceolata, reaching the Philip-pines and Indonesia.The genus as a whole has primarily a sub-

tropical and warm-temperate distribution,and even the most northerly species haveonly a moderate degree of frost hardiness. Asa result, camellias as garden plants are

restricted to areas with relatively mild cli-mates ; m areas with more severe climates, ’

plants must be grown in greenhouses duringthe winter. As horticultural plants, the mostimportant species are the more temperateones in the genus, with C. japonicabeing by far the most prominent. In fact, ifone mentions camellias, the image thatcomes to mind for most people is this spe-cies.

Camellia japonicaCamellia japonica was the first species to bebrought into cultivation m the West, andalthough it was described on the basis of

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material from Japan, probably all the earlyintroductions during the late EighteenthCentury and early Nineteenth Century werefrom China. Linnaeus named the species in1753 on the basis of the illustration and

description in Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amoen-itatum Exoticarum Politico-Physico-Medi-carum, published in 1712. Kaempfer’s workwas the result of a visit to Japan from 1690to 1692, when he was employed as a doctorby the Dutch East-India Company. The ear-liest illustration of C. japonica in the Westwas by the English apothecary James Petiver,who published a description and illustrationof this species in his Gazophylacii NaturaeeJ Artis in 1701 based on a collection sentback to England from China by James Cun-ningham. Cunningham’s collections were

among the earliest specimens of Chineseplants available to Western botanists. Cun-ningham collected his specimens when hewas a physician in the service of the EnglishEast-India Company, which had establisheda trading post, or factory, as they were thencalled, on Zhushan (Chushan) Island, oppo-site the city of Ningpo. Although the postlasted only a few years, Cunningham col-lected plants representing about 600 species,which he sent back as herbarium specimensto James Petiver and Leonard Plukenet.Among them were specimens of Camelliajaponica and C. sinensis, as well as of C.fraterna, although the last specimen was notdetermined until the 1950s. The Petiver andPlukenet collections were later purchased bySir Hans Sloane, and Sloane’s collectionbecame the foundation of the British Museum(Natural History).Neither Cunningham nor Kaempfer was

responsible for bringing C. japonica into cul-tivation in the West, and although this spe-cies is a conspicuous element in the forestsof southern Japan, the earliest introductionswere all from Chinese gardens. The first

plant for which we have any historical record

was one grown by James Lord Petre at leastas early as 1739. This plant was the modelfor the first color illustration of a Camelliain the West, which was used as a prop for anillustration of a Chmese pheasant publishedby George Edwards in 1745. The origin ofLord Petre’s plant is not known, although itis obviously a cultivar of C. japonica andmust have been brought back from China byone of the ship captains of the English East-India Company. Lord Petre died of smallpoxat the age of 29 in 1742, but many of hisplants were taken over by his gardener, PhilipMiller, who was in charge of the ChelseaPhysic Garden, and it is quite likely that hisC. japonica was among them. During thesecond half of the Eighteenth Century, C.

japonica was grown in England, but its popu-larity can be traced to the importation of sev-eral specific cultivars from China in the lateEighteenth Century.During this period the British were rapidly

expanding their trade m southern China, andship captains were encouraged by wealthyBritish horticulturists to bring back plantsfor their gardens. Two C. japonica cultivars,’Alba Plena’ and ’Variegata’, are of particularnote. They were brought back to England m1792 by Captain Connor of the East-IndiaMerchantman Carnatic, and were illustratedin Andrews’s Botanical Repository in 1792.The great enthusiasm for growing C. japon-ica from the end of the Eighteenth Centurythrough most of the Nineteenth Century canreally be dated from the importation of thesetwo cultivars. Over the next few decadesthere was a great flurry of interest in thisspecies, as can be seen from the sumptuouslyillustrated books and hand-colored plates inperiodicals of the early Nineteenth Century.Between 1792 and 1830, at least twenty-threecultivars of C. japonica had been introducedfrom Asia, most if not all of them fromChina. Subsequently, a great many new cul-tivars have been named from seedlings grown

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in the West, as well as from later introduc-tions from Asia. At present, there are severalthousand named cultivars of C. 7apomca,with many more being named every year.

Camellia sinensis

The second species to be brought into culti-vation in the West was C. sinensis. This spe-cies was known to be the source of tea thathad been imported to England and Europesmce the Seventeenth Century. Live plantsof C. sinensis may have been cultivated in

England as early as 1740 by Captain Geoff,

who was a director of the East-India Com-

pany and brought plants back as a gift for hiswife. However, it appears that these plantsdied, and therefore that the first person tocultivate plants of this species in Europe suc-cessfully was Linnaeus.Linnaeus was familiar with the tea plant

from the publications of Siebold, and it wason the basis of Siebold’s published descrip-tion of the tea plant, and the accompanyingillustration, that Linnaeus named the genusThea in 1735 and the species T sinensis in1753. However, it is quite certam that whenLinnaeus named this species he had not yet

Two renditions of Camellia sasanqua from Curtis’s Botamcal Magazine (1859 and 1940, respectively) The plant m theleft-hand drawmg is called "Camellia sasanqua var. anemomflora," the anemone-flowered vanety.

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seen a living plant or even a dried specimenof it. Thea is no longer recognized as a sep-arate genus, and the species T sinensis hasbeen transferred to the genus Camellia. Bythe middle of the Eighteenth Century, teawas already an important import from Asia,and there was considerable interest in

obtaining living plants of Thea sinensis.

Although Sweden did not have as significanta role in the commerce with eastern Asia asdid England, Portugal, or the Netherlands,there was still a Swedish East Asia TradingCompany, and it was through the efforts ofthe Swedish captain Carolus Gustavus Eck-erberg that Linnaeus was able to obtain liveplants. The seeds were obtained in China andwere planted in pots shortly after Eckerbergset sail for Europe. Live plants were pre-sented to Linnaeus on October 3, 1763.

Although C. sinensis is the only species ofany major economic importance in the genus,it has never received much attention as a

garden plant.

Camellia sasanqua and C. oleiferaThe first two species of Camellia to bedescribed were also the first two to be

brought into cultivation, but this pattern didnot always continue with subsequent spe-cies. The third species to be formally namedaccording to the binomial system of Lin-naeus was C. sasanqua. It was named byThunberg, one of Linnaeus’s students whomade major collections in both Japan andSouth Africa. Although it is a Japanese spe-cies and thus beyond the scope of this article,C. sasanqua must be mentioned because ithas been confused with several subsequentlydescribed and introduced Chinese species. C.sasanqua had been known by earlier travel-lers to Japan, as it was mentioned by Siebold,but unlike C. japonica and C. sinensis, thisthird species was not named by Linnaeus. C.sasanqua remained somewhat of an enigma

up until the latter half of the Nineteenth

Century. The illustration in Thunberg’s 1784Flora japonica is rather cursorily drawn, andalthough there is a specimen of it in Thun-berg’s herbarium, both botanists and horti-culturists repeatedly confused C. sasanquawith other species from the mainland ofAsia. It was not until after Japan had openedits doors to Western contact that live plantsof C. sasanqua were grown in the West, inthe second half of the 19th century.Japan was quite effective m insulating her-

self from contact with the West, except forlimited trading contact through the port ofNagasaki. China was not as successful. The

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Camellia oleifera (Edwards’s Botanical Register, 1826).

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Portuguese were the first major Europeantraders to deal directly with Chma, and theirtradmg port of Macau dated from 1557. In1790, a Portuguese, Joannis de Loureiro, pub-lished a very important, although somewhatsketchy, account of the plants of southernChina and of what is now Vietnam. Amongthe plants he described were four Camelliaspecies. Most of these have turned out bevariations of C. sinensis. Some of Loureiro’s

specimens were sent to Sweden and ended upin the British Museum, and others remainedin Lisbon and have disappeared, except forthose which were stolen by Napoleon’s armyand are now in the Natural History Museum

Camellia mahflora (Curtis’s Botamcal Magazine, 1819)

in Paris. Unfortunately, C. drupifera is notamong the specimens that are extant. Lour-eiro’s description of this species is incom-plete, and confusion over its identity has ledvarious botanists to apply the name to whatare m reality various other species. Becauseof this confusion and the lack of an extantLoureiro specimen, the name now used forwhat may well be Loureiro’s C. drupifera isC. oleifera.The name Camellia oleifera was first used

by Clarke Abel for a plant that he found whenhe accompanied Lord Amherst’s embassy tothe Chinese Court. Essentially all earlierbotanical collections from China were fromcoastal areas, and it was fortunate that theAmherst embassy had a naturalist along dur-ing its trek across eastern China. Camelllaoleifera is one of the most common speciesin China, largely because it is used as an oilcorp, a fact implied by the specific epithet,which means "oil-bearing." This species wasfirst brought into cultivation m 1803, four-teen years before Abel described it. A doubleform of C. oleifera was sent back to Englandby William Kerr, who was a plant collectorfor Kew in Canton. The plant brought backto England as C. sasanqua was named ’LadyBanks’s Camellia’ and was listed in the sec-ond edition of Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis. Sm-

gle forms of this species were subsequentlybrought back to England and can be seen inearly Nineteenth Century publications oncamellias.

Camellia malifloraThe next Chinese camellia mtroduced to theWest was C. maliflora, which is a double-flowered Camellia brought back from Chinaby Captain Richard Rawes for Thomas CareyPalmer. This Camellia was illustrated in1819 in Curtis’s Botamcal Magazme as C.sasanqua ’Palmer’s Double’, but in 1827 JohnLindley recognized it as a distinct species and

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named it C. maliflora. This species hassmall, double, pink flowers that measureonly about 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) in

diameter. The species has never been foundin the wild, even as a simple-flowered form,and it is quite likely that it is in reality ahybrid species.Aside from C. japonica, probably the most

important species to horticulture describedduring the 19th century was C. reticulata,although its horticultural potential was notfully realized until over a century later. Thehistory of this species’s introduction to theWest is quite different from that of C. japon-ica, and the impact of C. reticulata on thecultivated camellias in the West is still at a

rapid stage of development. One of the mainvirtues of this species is its large flowers,with the flowers of some cultivars such as

Camellia reticulata (Edwards’s Botamcal Register, 1827).

’Dali Cha’ having a diameter of 22 centime-ters (8.7 inches).

Introduction of Camellia reticulata intoWestern Gardens

Because of the rather interesting historyassociated with this species and my owninvolvement in the recent developmentsconcerning introduction of cultivars fromChina, I would like to give a more detailedaccount of facts surrounding its introductioninto Western gardens. Camellia reticulatawas described by Lindley in 1827 on the basisof a cultivated plant intoduced to England in1824 by J. D. Parks and given the Englishname ’Captain Rawes’s Camellia’, in honorof the ship’s captain who brought what wasapparently the same cultivar from China in1820 for Thomas Carey Palmer. Lindleyexpressed concern that this camellia wassterile and questioned whether it deserveddesignation as a species, but the plant wasobviously different from any previouslyknown camellia. The reason for the sterilityof this cultivar is that it is a triploid, althoughall later material of this species has beenshown to be hexaploid. The exact origin ofthe ’Captain Rawes’s Camellia’ is uncertainbut it must have been obtained as a pottedplant in either Macau or Guangzhou (Can-ton). A second cultivar of the same specieswas brought back from China by Robert For-tune, probably during his second expeditionto China, between 1848 and 1851, when hewas collecting plants in China for the nurs-ery of Standish and Noble. This cultivar wasnamed ’Flore Pleno’ by Lindley in 1857, butthe cultivar name usually given to thiscamellia in England is ’Robert Fortune’. Wenow know this cultivar to be the one grownin Yunnan as’Songzilin; or "pine cone scale."Throughout the Nineteenth Century, C.reticulata was known in the West only by

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these two cultivars.It was not until the 1930s that Otto Stapf,

an Austrian botanist at Kew, recognizedsome of the plants grown from seeds collect-ed by the Scottish collector George Forrestas wild forms of C. reticulata. Forrest’s col-lections were made near the town of Tong-chong (formerly known as Tungyueh), nearthe Burmese border of Yunnan Province.

Tongchong was the base of operations for For-rest during his various expeditions to Chinaand also the customs station for commercebetween Burma and China. In addition to col-

lecting herbarium specimens, Forrest sentseeds back to Great Britain, where plantswere grown by J. C. Williams of CaerhaysCastle, Cornwall. In 1935 Robert Sealy, whotook over Stapf’s work on camellias whenStapf died in 1933, published the first illus-tration of the simple-flowered C. reticulatagrown from Forrest’s seeds.The next stage in the introduction of C.

reticulata mto Western gardens can be tracedto a 1938 article by the Chinese plant taxo-nomist, H. H. Hu, published m the Journalof the Royal Horticultural Society. ProfessorHu presented a paper on the horticulturalresources of China in which he mentionedthat Kunming was a center of camellia cul-tivation and that some seventy cultivars of

outstandmg value were grown there. AlthoughHu does not give the source of his informa-tion, it seems certain that his informationwas from a 1930 publication in Chinese bythe scholar Fang Shu-mei. In Fang’s pubhca-tion, Tiannan Chahua Xiaozhi, seventycamellia cultivar names are listed, althoughonly a fraction of these names can be allo-cated to C. reticulata. It is surprising thatnone of the Western plant collectors whopassed through Kunming from the late Nine-teenth Century through the middle of theTwentieth Century mention these magnifi-cent cultivated camellias.

Cultivars of Camellia reticulata

The first detailed information on the Kun-

ming C. reticulata cultmars was m an articlepresented by T. T. Yu at the 1950 magnoliasand camellias conference in England. Profes-sor Yu had been working at the Fan MemorialInstitute of Biology’s botanical research sta-tion in Kunmmg during the late 1930s andearly 1940s. One of his interests at the timewas the cultivated camellias of Kunming. Inthe Kunming area many large trees of C.reticulata grow in the courtyards of templessuch as those in Xishan and in Heilongtan.The latter of these is in fact right next to theresearch institute where Professor Yu was

Camellia euryoides (Edwards’s Botarucal Register, 1826).See page 12.

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working. In addition, Professor Yu had avail-able to him the extensive camellia collectionmade by Mr. Liu, a wealthy merchant andcamellia fancier. Professor Yu was able to

identify eighteen cultivars of C. reticulataand four cultivars of C. japonica being grownin the Kunming area, and it is about thesecultivars that he reported in his 1950 article.The discrepancy between the seventy cul-

tivars listed by Fang and the eighteen describedby Yii can be attributed to the difference inapproach of the two authors. Fang was not abotanist but a traditional Chinese scholar,and he based his list only in part on his ownobservations and drew liberally from theChinese horticultural literature dating backto the Ming Dynasty. Most of these oldernames were cultivars of C. japonica and werenot even from Yunnan. Professor Yu, on theother hand, was trained as a botanist andbased his work on actual observations. AfterWorld War II, Professor Yu went to the RoyalBotanic Garden, Edinburgh, where he workedon the eastern Himalayan species of Coto-neaster, and it was at the end of his stay at

Edinburgh that he presented his paper on theKunming camellias. He had also written alonger treatise on the subject that he hopedto get published in the West. When ProfessorYu returned to China in 1950 the manuscriptwas in the possession of Robert O. Rubel ofMobile, Alabama, who operated a camellianursery and who had been in correspondencewith Mr. Liu in Kunming and, through thiscontact, with T. T. Yu. When Yu was in Edin-

burgh he sent his manuscript to Rubel, whoplanned to publish it. However, Yu returnedto China in late 1950 before the publicationwas complete, and Rubel lost contact withhim. In 1964 Frank Griffin published a pho-tolithograph copy of the original typedmanuscript, complete with handwritten cor-rections. It was with great pleasure that in1980 I was able to present Professor Yu witha copy of this publication, which he did not

have.In the late 1940s two American camellia

growers, Walter Lammerts and Ralph Peer,independently tried to obtain plants of theKunming C. reticulata cultivars. Throughtheir efforts, what at the time were believedto be nineteen cultivars were obtained from

Kunming. Several of these cultivars were

subsequently lost, and some of the cultivarswere mislabeled, so it appears that only four-teen cultivars were m fact successfully intro-duced to the West. These cultivars have been

responsible for a great resurgence in interestin camellias and have been used extensivelyfor hybridizing as well as being grown fortheir own memts.

Following these initial introductions, con-tact with people in Chma was for the mostpart impossible, and for many years no fur-ther introductions took place. In the 1960sColonel Tom Durrant of New Zealand sys-tematically straightened out those caseswhere there was confusion over which cul-tivars had in fact been brought out of Chmain the 1940s. He was able to show that thetrue cultivars of ’Jiangjia Cha’, ’Baozhu Cha’,and ’Daguiye’ were not being grown in theWest. When New Zealand established dip-lomatic relations with China m the 1960s,Durrant was able to obtain several of the cul-tivars that had not been introduced in thelate 1940s or that had been subsequentlyconfused.

During the 1960s, a Japanese camellia

grower, Ikada, discovered that there wereadditional cultivars still in Yunnan, and hestarted to obtam those that he could. He alsomade available to the English-speaking worldsome of the information on Kunming reti-culatas.

Recent Work in China on C. reticulata

In 1978 I had the great privilege to be a mem-ber of the Botanical Society of America’s del-

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egation to the People’s Republic of China,along with Richard Howard of the ArnoldArboretum and eight other American bota-nists. We were very fortunate to be able tovisit the Kunming Institute of Botany.Kunming had just been opened to foreigners,and we were among the first delegations tobe able to include Kunming in their itmerary.I was particularly interested in finding outabout the work on garden varieties of C.

reticulata being done at the Kunming Insti-tute of Botany.

In 1958 T. T. Yii and Y. Z. Feng publisheda small book on the Kunming C. reticulatacultivars. This Chinese work basically con-tained much of the same information as the

English publication that was written by Pro-

Camellia kissi (Loddiges’s Botamcal Cabmet, 1832J Seepage 13.

fessor Yii before 1950 but not published until1964. However, there were two additionalcultivars, ’Jiangjia Cha’ and ’Tongzimian’,which were not known to Professor Yu m the1940s. ’Tongzimian’ is a particularly inter-esting cultivar. An old cultivar from the Daharea about 400 kilometers (250 miles) westof Kunming, it is the only cultivar withalmost white flowers.

After the Yu and Feng book was published,the work at the Kunming Institute of Botanyconcentrated in two directions. One was theselection of new cultivars from seedlingsgrown at the Kunming Institute of Botany,and the other was an mvestigation of the cul-tivars grown in the Dali area. The culmina-tion of this work was an article by G. M. Fengand Z. M. Shi that was published in the short-lived journal Zhiwu Ymchong Xuhua likan("Plant Introduction and Domestication").This article was pubhshed at the beginningof the Cultural Revolution, and almost allthe new cultivars mentioned by Feng and Shino longer exist. However, the old cultivarssurvived and are still being grown.

Since the Cultural Revolution, work hasconcentrated on selecting and naming newcultivars at the Kunming Institute of Botanyand on surveying the wild C. reticulataplants growing in the Tengchong area. Asmentioned above, m the area around Teng-chong are to be found single-flowered plantsof C. reticulata. Whether these plants canreally be called wild or semicultivated is hardto say. The plants are not grown in orchards,but the seeds are harvested and the oilexpressed and used as a cooking oil. Matureplants of C. reticulata reach 10 meters (33feet) or more in height and are, in fact, smalltrees. In a few areas this species forms camel-lia forests. These camellias have been sys-tematically surveyed and numbered, andsuperior forms have been given cultivar names.Among these cultivars are not only smgle-flowered forms but some that are semidouble

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and double. The culmination of this work isa book on the Camellia reticulata cultivarsof Yunnan, which has been published bothin a Chinese and Japanese edition. An Englishedition is in press. These editions are in real-

ity different books, because the texts aresomewhat different, as are the sets of illus-trations. Unfortunately, the named cultivarsin the Tengchong area exist only as the par-ent plants and have not yet been propagated.If local farmers decide to use any of thesetrees as firewood, which does happen, thecultivars involved will be lost forever.

Camellia rosaeflora (Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1858).See page 13.

Since 1979, I have been attempting to

obtain all of the Yunnan cultivars of C. reti-culata and to distribute them to interestedbotanical gardens in the West. In cases wherethere is no question about the identity of thecultivar already growing in the United Statesthere has been no need to obtain additionalmaterial from China, but if there has beenany question concerning the correct identity,as there is with ’Baozhu Cha’ and ’Daguiye’,I have been able to obtain additional scionsfrom Kunming even though the plants grownunder these cultivar names are grown in theUnited States. I have obtained almost all ofthe old cultivars grown in Yunnan, as well asthe new cultivars named at the KunmingInstitute of Botany. However, I have obtainedonly one of the Tengchong cultivers, ’Xiao-yulan’, which, as far as I have been able toascertain, is the only cultivar of the morethan thirty Tengchong cultivars that is cur-rently being grown in Kunming.

Since 1981 it has been impossible to obtainany additional camellia cultivars from

Kunming because of regulations imposed byChina. I do not know the reason for these

restrictions, but they have essentially stoppedall exchange in camellias. At present we haveavailable 65 of the 105 cultivars currently rec-ognized in China, which is four times thegenetic diversity with which the growing ofthis species became established in the early1950s.

Other SpeciesCamellia euryoides is another species thatwas first known as a cultivated plant. It wasnamed by Lindley on the basis of a plant thatflowered in March 1826 in Cheswick Garden,England. The plant had been the rootstockfor a C. japonica brought back to England byJohn Potts, a plant collector for the RoyalHorticultural Society in India and Chma in1821 and 1822. This same species appeared

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as a rootstock from plants brought back toEngland by Parks in 1824. For over a hundredyears this small, white-flowered camelliawas known m the West only from cultivatedplants, but it has now been found in the wild,in Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi provinces.The next species to be brought mto culti-

vation was C. kissii. This species is verywidespread from Nepal all the way to south-eastern China and Southeast Asia. It wasdescribed by Wallich in 1820, and live plantsof it were obtained in 1823 by Samuel Brooks,who was a nurseryman particularly mterest-ed in importing Chinese plants.Camellia rosaeflora is another species that

was first described from a rootstock plant.The species was described by Hooker in 1858on the basis of a plant that had long beengrown at Kew as C. euryoides. Camelliarosaeflora was subsequently lost but redis-covered as a cultivated plant in Ceylon in

A double-flowered vanety of Camellia rosaefloraReproduced from Gardeners’ Chromcle (1928)

1935. More recently, the species has beenfound as a wild-growing plant in Hubei,Jiangsu, Sichuan, and Zhejiang provinces,China. It is interesting to speculate on theongin of the plants of C. euryoides and C.rosaeflora on which these two species weredescribed. From the currently known wilddistribution of these two species, it seems

quite likely that C. euryoides was being usedas rootstock for C. japonica in Guangzhou,whereas C. rosaeflora was being used as

rootstock in Shanghai.Camellia rosaeflora was the last Chinese

species of Camellia to be successfully intro-duced to the West during the NineteenthCentury, although the Japanese species C.

sasanqua apparently was brought into cul-tivation in France by 1869 and m England tenyears later. Additional Chinese species weredescribed during the Nineteenth Century,including C. assimilis, C. caudata, C. edi-thae, C. fraterna, C. grijsii, C. hongkongen-sis and C. salicifolia. Except for C. hongkong-ensis, which was briefly grown at Kew, noneof these species were introduced to the Westbefore the present century.

Twentieth Century Introductions

Comparatively few camellias were intro-duced during the first half of the TwentiethCentury. A notable species is C. cuspidata,collected by E. H. Wilson in 1900 when hewas collecting for the nursery of Veitch andSons. Plants grown from the Wilson seedsfirst flowered in 1912 and were reported andillustrated in the Gardeners’ Chronicle.The most important introductions during

the first third of the Twentieth Century werethose by George Forrest. As mentioned above,Forrest collected in Yunnan between 1913and 1931. During this period he was respon-sible for sending back seeds of C. reticulata,C. saluenensis, C. taliensis, and C. tsaii. Ofthese four species, the first two are the most

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important as garden plants.The next period of Camellia introduction

from China started in the late 1920s and1930s and has continued with major inter-ruptions to the present. The first two botani-cal gardens in China were the Sun Yat-senBotanical Garden in Nanjing and the LushanBotanical Garden on Mt. Lushan in Jiangxiprovince. In the 1930s, both C. fraterna andC. pitardii var. yunnanica were obtainedfrom the Lushan Botanical Garden, and pos-sibly a few other species now grown in theUnited States were sent out of China duringthis period.

It appears that from the late 1930s to thelate 1970s no camellias were introduced to

Camellia cuspidata, a species mth a shrub habit, pho-tographed m the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, by E. /Walhs. Photograph from the Archives of the ArnoldArboretum.

the West from the mainland of China exceptC. reticulata. However, there were two veryinteresting introductions from Hong Kong.In late 1955, Mr. C. P. Lau of the Hong KongHerbarium found a single plant of a new andvery spectacular Camellia in the New Ter-ritories of Hong Kong. This new species wasnamed C. granthamiana the following year,in honor of Alexander Grantham, the Gov-ernor of Hong Kong at the time. This Camel-lia has a single white flower up to about 14centimeters (5.5 inches) in diameter. Thisspecies has many characteristics that placeit as one of the more primitive members ofthe genus. Camelha granthamiana has nowbeen widely propagated both from seeds andcuttings.Another very interesting species from Hong

Kong is C. crapnelliana, which was describedfrom a single tree discovered in 1903 on thesouthern side of Mt. Parker on Hong KongIsland. The plant was collected only once,and that only for herbarium specimens. Thespecies has large, glossy leaves, single whiteflowers, and smooth, brick-red bark. In 1965,Mr. Y. S. Lau of the Hong Kong Herbariumrediscovered what must be the same tree, butthis tree has not yet flowered. In 1967, FatherJoseph Ly found this species growing in densewoods in Mau Ping, New Territories, and asubsequent search found 58 trees bearingfruit and flowers, as well as several seedlings.This rediscovered species has now beenextensively propagated in both Hong Kongand the West.

Recent Introductions

Since the normalization of relations betweenChina and the United States quite a fewCamellia species have been obtained fromChinese sources. The species that has receivedthe most attention is C. chrysantha, whichis a yellow-flowered species from Guangxiprovince. There has been a great deal of inter-

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est in this species since it was described in1965 by Professor H. H. Hu, in an article onfourteen new species and varieties belongingto Camellia and segregate genera.On January 23, 1980, I received five seeds

of C. chrysantha at the University of Cali-fornia Botanical Garden, of which I was

curator at the time. The seeds were sent tome by Professor Zhang Aoluo, who was thenthe director of the Kunming Botanical Gar-den. Professor Zhang had also sent five seedsto William L. Ackerman, of the U.S. Nation-al Arboretum, as well as five seeds each topeople in Japan and Australia. These werethe first seeds of this species sent out ofChina through regular channels, althoughsome years earlier either seeds or scions hadbeen obtained by camellia growers in Japan.The seeds sent by Zhang were collected inDecember 1979 by staff of the KunmingBotanical Garden at the Malu commune,Fengcheng county, in Guangxi, at an eleva-tion of 300 meters (975 feet~. Both Ackermanand I were able to germinate four seeds, andthe resulting eight plants have been exten-sively propagated and distributed to botani-cal gardens and camellia growers on both theeast and west coasts of the United States andabroad.The main importance of yellow camellias,

of which more than ten species have beendescribed, is the hope by Camelha hybridiz-ers to incorporate the genes for yellow flowercolor mto other cultivated camellias, result-ing in a much wider range of colors than nowavailable. One of the problems is that C.

chrysantha is in a different subgenus, thesubgenus Thea, from the majority of culti-vated species and hybrids, which belong tothe subgenus Camellia.Over the past few years I have been able to

obtain seeds and scions of a number of otherChinese Camellia species from the KunmingBotanical Garden and other botamcal gar-dens in China. Of particular importance are

C. chekiangoleosa, C. polyodonta, and C.semiserrata, all of which belong to sectionCamellia and will be spectacular gardenplants with large red flowers. Other speciesthat I have been able to obtain mclude C.

cordifoha, C. forrestii, C. gigantocarpa, C.grijsii, C. octopetala, C. vietnamensis, C.

yuhsienensis, and C. yunnanensis. Most ofthese species have been distributed to camel-lia growers and botanical gardens in theUnited States. At present, almost fifty of themore than two hundred described Camellia

species are in cultivation m the West, butstill more than three-quarters of the current-ly recognized species have yet to be grown ascultivated plants, even in China. I hope thatmany of these remaining species will be cul-tivated in China and that the exchange thatbegan in the late 1970s will resume for theenjoyment of people in both China and theWest.

Bruce Bartholomew, collection manager for theDepartment of Botany, Cahforma Academy ofSciences, has made four tnps to Chma m the lastdecade.