Most people picture a camellia as a shrub in a pot.
Common Camellia
A camellia is supposed to drop its flower whole, head and all, which is why samurai were said to dislike them. This page maps every common camellia on the site, 4 so far across 3 cities.
The four hundred year old tree at Byakugo-ji in Nara does not: it sheds petal by petal, and it opens red, white, peach, striped and variegated blossoms on the same plant, which is how it became one of the three famous camellias of the city. The other three mapped here are Portuguese, and that is not an accident. The mild wet north of the country suited Camellia japonica so well that Portuguese growers ended up exporting it back to the rest of Europe. Porto has traded on that since the nineteenth century; the pair in front of the church at Paranhos are six and a half metres tall with crowns ten metres across, which is not what most people expect from a shrub in a pot.
Porto
Photo: Júlio Reis (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Camellias of Casa TaitEnsemble
Porto calls itself the City of Camellias, and the oldest proof of that claim is a set of hedges, not a single tree.
Guimaraes
Eighteen camellias planted across two garden terraces here have outlived the building's most fashionable era by more than a century.
Nara
One tree, five colours, and it does not drop its flowers the way a camellia is supposed to.
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