Camellias

Camellias belong to the tea family, and can be cultivated outdoors only where the winters are mild. Their elegant, flawless and uniformly shaped blossoms have captivated man over the ages. East Asians have cultivated the camellia as an ornamental plant for more than a thousand years. Europeans have known the plant for just 300 years or so. In the nineteenth century, camellias became very fashionable and the upper classes began displaying them in their conservatories. Alexandre Dumas even gave literary cachet to this exotic plant in 1848, when he published his novel The Lady of the Camellias, widely known in the English-speaking world as Camille.