Camellia
The top photo is the poor abused bush I’m worried about. It has already suffered from a disastrous pruning, the result of reversing instructions. The bush was supposed to be reduced in height, but the height is all that survived. It is starting to fill in at the bottom but it has taken years. It is obviously grafted which can be seen in the pink blossoms, white blossoms, and the ‘peppermint’ blossoms seen in the picture of the individual flower [my personal favorite].
These plants are members of the tea family and are native to Asia.
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—Just planted 8 of them this Fall—-beautiful when they bloom in Winter.
It is amusing that the Knights of the White Camellia adopted a foreign import as their official emblem for their racist organization… that’s as smart as having meth and marijuana on you while wearing a shirt that says “I Have Drugs”. Floriduh. LOL.
– Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin
I like the peppermint ones too.
They are beautiful any time, Karmanof, but in bleak mid-winter especially so. Their colors always seem more vibrant that other flowers.
It also ties to their Tea Party personas, Badtux. Actually camellias weren’t introduced to the US until after there was a US, and were first planted in New Jersey. The White Camellia is/was the symbol of New Zealand’s suffragette movement. Well, the study of history was never a strong point with most of the WASP movements that have risen in the US. As for Florida – we have had a Republican government since 2000, so the quality of the education received by the local population is not exactly first world.
Every bloom is different, just like ‘a box of chocolates’, Hipparchia 🙂
The camellia in my back yard is my harbinger of spring. It’s the first thing that blooms while it’s still mostly cool weather. After a long winter, I know that spring really, really will get here soon.
We’re having -10 F wind chill here tonight. One window in a back bedroom is missing it’s storm window. I thought, “Is that ice on the inside of the window?”. Yep, I could scratch it off with my fingernail. I hate January.
I think the problem was a run of warmer than normal temperatures after the last chill. It is filled with buds and the new growth at the bottom is budding and producing blooms now. I had high hopes, but the weather is no longer working like it used to. All it takes is a shift in the wind to bring in huge temperature changes. When it shifts back to coming from the South things will warm up quickly.
Now I have to wait for the azaleas to do their thing in about a month.
At 11PM it is 35° with a wind chill of 27, not as bad as your temperatures, but not what people come to the Gulf Coast to experience.
At 11PM it is 35° with a wind chill of 27, not as bad as your temperatures, but not what people come to the Gulf Coast to experience.
Yes, indeed, that’s bad for your area. Still, I’d take it. The wind chill is still only 4 F here, and it’s freaking 10:17 in the a.m.
Did I mention that I hate January.
And I have a so-called friend that lives in Miami crowing about her 84 F yesterday. Apparently, she likes to live dangerously.
The response is to call her in July or August and mention your relatively cheap utility bill and what a pleasantly mild day you are having. It’s 11AM and the temperature has just managed to make it back up to 32. At 7:20AM it was 19. In the middle of the peninsula they will have to look for iguanas falling out of trees because the stupid lizards climb up there, get too cold to move, and then drop to the ground. Every area has it problems. When was the last time you had to hunker down for a hurricane warning?
At least you *get* hurricane warnings. There’s no such thing as an earthquake warning here on the West Coast, the first you’ll know is when your house suddenly starts wobbling back and forth as a rumbling sound like a freight locomotive fills the air.
… Or when the water in the complex’s swimming pool stays in place while the pool drops and then bounces up as happened in the 6.6 in San Diego while I was there.
Every place has its ‘peculiarities’ that makes it unique, and nowhere is it perfect… unfortunately.
this seems to be some kind of fad – recently I’ve noticed people, not too many fortunately, pruning their azaleas and camellias like this. presumably the plants survive it if a number of people are doing it, and it’s kind of interesting to look at, in other people’s yards, as you drive down the road, but the whole point of having azaleas and camellias is the masses of blooms.
“Or when the water in the complex’s swimming pool stays in place while the pool drops and then bounces up ”
and people ask me why I like living in hurricane alley….
They are pruned that way to make it easier to mow and to put down the mulch. They look terrible and it is hard to get blooms to bring inside. Azaleas make good privacy hedges, and provide swathes of color when in bloom.
Oh, yes, warnings give you option of making rational decisions rather than being half asleep and crawling for a doorway. If I had stayed I would have built a bed out of two by sixes to avoid having to move.
They say don’t run for a doorway now, they say roll off your bed to between your bed and the outside wall (assuming there’s a 3 foot gap there), because if the wall collapses inwards the bed will keep it from crushing you, and if it collapses outwards the bed will keep the ceiling from crushing you. Frankly I suspect I’d sleep right through it anyhow. I lived under an airport runway for almost ten years, after all. In fact, the last earthquake I felt, at first I thought it was an especially loud jet taking off from the San Jose airport, I was thinking “man, that must be someone’s private jet, because commercial jets aren’t allowed to be that loud anymore” and then I noticed the chandelier in the dining room starting to sway back and forth and realized that the rumbling in the floorboards was *not* an especially heavy train pounding by on the tracks (yep, that one was a twofer, I was both under the airport flyway *and* by the tracks! Slept just fine, y’all!).
The hardest thing to accept has been not being able to have bookcases in the bedroom. Even if you tie them to a wall, hundreds of pounds of books flying off of shelves onto where you’re sleeping is not conducive to health.
“hundreds of pounds of books flying off of shelves onto where you’re sleeping is not conducive to health.”
pummeled to death by your own library… I suppose there are worse ways to go….
I can see how that would be a better solution and easier to do than going for the doorway, unless you had a water bed.
I had book shelves in my bedroom when the 6.6 hit and they weren’t bothered, but they were only three shelves high. The dishes and cans in the upper cabinets in my kitchen weren’t as well behaved as the books.
How about ‘trapped in the rubble and devoured by your cats’, Hipparchia?
‘trapped in the rubble and devoured by your cats’
ugh. you win.