secret "Camellia" garden

 Driving on this beautiful day in my town,I came across beauty!  I was envious.

Orchid tree

Stopping to admire the above floral displays, I happened upon a secret Camellia garden.   It was obvious that the dedicated gardener knows what he/she is doing...I was drawn in, though uninvited, but no one came out to greet me or scold me.  What I saw took my breath away. And to think I discovered it just at the peak of the year.  I am determined to  meet the gardener.

HOLY COW!

 

 

 



 

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About Camellias

Southern Living says an energetic Frenchman named André Michaux impacted Southern gardens more profoundly than anyone. Plant explorer and botanist to King Louis XVI, he established the South’s first botanical garden just north of Charleston in 1786. Now- familiar species he introduced sound like a Who’s Who of Southern classics―sweet olive (Osmanthus fragrans), ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), mimosa (Albizia julibrissin), Chinese parasol tree (Firmiana simplex), and Chinaberry (Melia azedarach). One stands out above the rest―the common camellia (Camellia japonica).

 

 Tsubaki-mochi(椿餅) are sandwiched buns between two leaves of camellia. This confection appears in the Tale of Genji although it didn't contain sugar. Camellia leaves are inedible, but cherry leaves wrapping sakura-mochi are edible.



Camellias have been favored as one of flowers appropriate for tea ceremonies or tea house. Powerful people including Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Hidetada the second Shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate also loved camellia blossoms. It became a status symbol for cultural figures to have camellias, and various varieties of camellias had been created during the Edo Period. A fondness for camellias spread among commoners.

A nephew of the first Shogun ordered a painter to paint a 24m-long picture scroll called“  One Hundred Camellias”in 1635.

 The scroll shows a variety of flowers arranged not only in flower vases but in articles for daily use such as a bowl, a fan, a basket, a trash tray. Forty-nine foremost cultural figures including the second lord of the Mito domain, poets, scholars, monks wrote 52 poems in the margin of the scroll. The poems include the above Sakato no Hitotari's poem.
Some varieties of camellias written on it are now lost. The process of improvement in camellia varieties can be inferred from the scroll.

The size of a dime, it was the smallest one

   I just ordered this book from Amazon.  It is an "astonishing and unknown story of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan who inspired Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel and play La dame aux camélias, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata, George Cukor’s film Camille, and Frederick Ashton’s ballet Marguerite and Armand. Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Greta Garbo, Isabelle Huppert, Maria Callas, Anna Netrebko, and Margot Fonteyn are just a few of the celebrated actors, singers, and dancers who have portrayed her." Who knew?
    "   Kavanagh brilliantly re-creates the short, intense, and passionate life of the tall, pale, slender girl who at thirteen fled her brute of a father and Normandy to go to Paris, where she would become one of the grand courtesans of the 1840s. France’s national treasure, Alexandre Dumas père, was intrigued by her, his son became her lover, and Franz Liszt, too, fell under her spell. Quick to adapt an aristocratic mien, with elegant clothes, a coach, and a grand apartment, she entertained a salon of dandies, writers, and artists. . Her early death at age twenty-three from tuberculosis created an outpouring of sympathy."

 noted by Charles Dickens, who wrote in February 1847:
“For several days all questions political, artistic, commercial have been abandoned by the papers. Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important, the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.” ..