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Cathy with ‘Red Candles’ Camellia

For the last few years we’ve gone to the U. S. National Arboretum during rose season, trying to catch some of the earlier, species roses. This year we decided to try our luck at getting there during the Camellia season, which for spring blooming Camellia japonica is early spring. Because that coincides with cherry blossoms, the Arboretum was quite busy. We drove past the cherry blossoms, though, and started in Fern Valley. There used to be a huge variety of daffodils planted there, but those are almost entirely gone now. It’s a little early for most things in Fern Valley but we did see some spreading Jacob’s-ladder (or Greek Valerian, Polemonium reptans), golden ragwort (or golden groundsel, Packera aurea), cutleaf toothwort (Cardamine concatenata), spring beauties (Claytonia virginica), bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), and quite a few trout lilies (Erythronium americanum).

From there we moved on to the Asian collection, which is where the Camellias are grown. I did a pretty good job of recording the names of the flowers I photographed and picked a few that I might consider adding to our garden. The photo here is the only one I took of Cathy with the Camellias and it’s called ‘Red Candles’, a very nice, vigorously flowering C. japonica.