Camellia Club of Mobile Newsletter

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Volume II Issue 7 _________________ April 2006

LAST MEETING OF THIS SEASON...

The final meeting of the 2005/2006 camellia season will take place at Mobile Botanical Gardens on April 9, with a social half-hour beginning

at 2:00 p.m. and the meeting at 2:30 p.m. We will have a panel of our most experienced growers to answer your questions about all aspects of camellia culture. This is always a very popular program since the Club has some excellent camellia brains to be picked. This is also the meeting where the Officers and Governing Board of the Club are elected for the next season, 2006/2007.

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great interest in fragrant camellias

Dr. Jim Dwyer’s program on fragrant camellias was very well attended with about 65 members present. We all learned a lot about these “camellias with an extra bonus” - and we found that they are not as rare as we may have thought. I personally located “Fragrant Pink” and “High Fragrance” at Kyle McKloski’s nursery in Lucedale, MS, and bought Dr. Ackerman’s “Ack-Scent” at Wal-Mart in Foley, AL, (and I wasn’t even looking for fragrant camellias...) Our thanks to Jim for all his work on the presentation, it was most informative and very much appreciated.

Mobile Festival of Flowers

The annual fund-raising event for Providence Hospital, the Festival of Flowers, took place the latter part of March as usual. The Camellia Club of Mobile has been part of this Festival since its inception thirteen years ago. At that very first show in 1994 our past President Jim Oates gave a

great talk on camellias - I wrote down his name and come October that year we called him to get his recommendations for camellias for our as yet non-existent flower garden (all we had was hundreds of pines and some cedars!). Jim took time out to take us to Vernon Howell’s nursery in Lucedale and we bought our very first camellias. Jim also took us to the November meeting of the Camellia Club of Mobile - and here we are -

with over 160 camellias plants of one hundred and eleven different named varieties! Hopefully the members signed up at this latest Festival will have the same happy experience we have had. Cristy Atkinson did a sterling job in organizing and arranging our Club’s display this year. Thanks are due all Club members who rallied behind Cristy and worked to make our stand a success in bringing camellias to the notice of all who attended the Festival of Flowers.

Barney Barnard

Past President N. C. “Barney” Barnard was admitted to Providence Hospital on March 24 for a quadruple by-pass involving open-heart surgery. The operation was a success and we are very pleased to report that Barney is doing well. The Club sent him a card before he entered the hospital to let him and Laura know that they are in our thoughts and prayers during this difficult time. Ray & Kay Calloway were at the Festival of Flowers on the day of the operation and stopped in at the hospital to see them. Kay’s report of the successful surgery set off a string of telephone calls throughout Baldwin and Mobile counties, relaying the good news - a bit like the olden days when they lit bonfires to spread news of a battle won from village to village!

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CAMELLIA CHAT

Many of us use Cygon as a preventive against scale on our camellia plants. Some spray an appropriately diluted mixture on the whole plant, others like me just paint an inch band around the main trunk with undiluted Cygon. Several years ago I heard a gentleman at the Fort Walton Beach Camellia Show advising against using this second method on any of the “Tomorrow” varieties. Since I have three of the various “Tomorrow”s I left them out of my Cygon painting, successfully using only a fine oil spray on them. Just the other day, while browsing through

on old ACS magazine, I found an article by a camellia grower who had lost several “Tomorrow”s after painting with Cygon - so be forewarned....

Blanding Drinkard has available a few copies of R. O. Rubel’s book “Camellia Culture” which was first published in l936 and has been reproduced. It contains timely and valuable tips for today’s camellia growers, and it definitely belongs in any collection of camellia books. Mr.

Rubel was very well-known in the camellia world and ran his nursery “Longview” at Crichton, Alabama, for about 60 years. He developed many

camellias including “Roosevelt Blues” and “Walter D. Bellingrath”. If you would like this book contact Blanding at 342-5912.

Went to a gardening seminar put on by the City of Foley Beautification people - mostly about antique roses and citrus, but on the table with the information giveaways was a very nicely produced full-color pamphlet on “The Culture of Camellias - the State Flower of Alabama”. We were

pleased to see that camellias were more than holding their own amidst the other gardening info available. This is a great 12-page booklet

published by the Alabama Co-operative Extension Service. The pamphlet no. is ANR-202. Lots of worthwhile information in it.