Mum's Red Camellia

A whiff of a particular fragrance can take you back years, sometimes to happy childhood memories.

For me, plants can do this too, or they remind me of a person - often Mum, of course, who gave me the garden and plant-loving gene.

I was giving planting plan advice in a country garden last week when I spotted this old variety of camellia, a true red touched with a tiny hint of pink. The shape and tint took me back to my childhood home in Melbourne's south-east where Mum planted this variety by her bedroom window...and something I did, but never owned up to.

Back in the 1970's `Go outside and play' may have been a much more common saying, and I loved the 20 or so fruit trees, the 2 tree houses, my chickens, and, when I was very young, wet soil for mud pies which were always decorated with flowers or berries.

But I was playing one time and picked a white camellia flower (from another shrub), which I placed on this red-blooming bush - and it looked very natural. (And the other way, but the red flower fell off the white bush.) I was just having fun but Mum thought that the shrub had thrown out a sport - and she got excited that her plant had had a genetic mutation occur (she was a botanist and she knew all about genes & DNA - even if  Crick & Watson hadn't worked out the structure of DNA until 1953, some years after she completed her science degree). Mum watched the camellia shrub eagerly for some time, to my dismay. I'd just been playing...but I never `fessed up.

(Speaking of camellias and hybridising, the oldest camellia in Australia is at Camden Park in NSW (the garden surrounding Camden Park is the largest and most intact Australian early colonial garden) where John Macarthur bred sheep from 1805 and his son, Sir William Macarthur, grew 'anemoniflora' or 'waratah' camellia (Camellia japonica var. anemoniflora), and bred some of the country's first hybrids including Camellia 'Aspasia macarthur'. Camden Park was horticulturally important and has always been associated with camellias.)

 I have another childhood memory of Mum and camellias - a happy one. We'd gone up to Olinda to see a flower show in late winter and there was a bank of - it seemed - hundreds of camellia blooms in all sorts of colours, shapes and sizes. Did Dad politely (and not interested, to be honest) ask us which flower was our favourite? Or was it chance that led Mum and me to point to the same flower at the same moment and exclaim `that's my favourite!'?

Mum and I enjoyed small flowers while one of my sisters always, but always, prefers the showy bigger ones, whether they are clematis, camellias or perennials.

It's interesting to think which genes came from whom. (My genes, not the camellias.)

I'm so lucky to have the gardening gene. 

Jill Weatherhead is horticulturist, writer, garden designer and principal at Jill Weatherhead Garden Design who lives in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, and works throughout Victoria. (www.jillweatherheadgardendesign.com.au).