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Camellia Club of Mobile |
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Camellia
Club of Mobile Newsletter _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Volume
IV Issue 6
March
2008 Set
your clocks ahead one hour (Daylight Saving Time begins) and bring your notepads
to our Meeting being held, as usual, at the Mobile Botanical Gardens
on March 9th. We will
be having a program devoted to fertilizing your camellia plants in order to get
them through the summer and into our next beautiful blooming season.
Copies of Walter Creighton’s 2006 lecture
“Springtime Camellia Culture” will
be available to those who would like one. The information in this is great, I followed it and this
season my camellias did their best ever! Come
at 2 p.m. to meet and chat with other members while enjoying our finger food
buffet, then settle in for an interesting & informative program beginning at
2:30 p.m. Looking forward to
seeing you there. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 New Members attend Grafting Session The February
Meeting on grafting was attended by 60 members, including 19 new ones. Past
President Jim Oates persuaded all the new members to stand and introduce
themselves in turn, it was really nice to meet and welcome them all this way.
It would seem that Vickie Baugh, our Garden Tour
organizer, may have several
candidates for super tours next season!
The Club presented Walter Creighton with a framed embroidered
camellia picture in recognition and appreciation of his serving twenty years as
Chairman of our Show Committee. (Walter, just because you got
the award, doesn’t mean you get to retire, your experience is too valuable!).
Brenda Litchfield gave a slide show on grafting, then the whole
audience surged forward to get an up-close and personal view of Jim Smelley and
Walter Creighton physically grafting scions. At least fifteen
members went home happily cuddling a big black pot with sand and a big styrofoam
cup stuck down on it. Visitors
walking the Botanical Garden
grounds were visibly puzzled at these smiling people with their odd burdens. When
it came to distributing the new grafts we did give
preference to new and newer members. Some older members are considering quitting
& rejoining as new members just to get a graft! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We had three
Garden Tours this season, very capably organized by Board Member Vickie Baugh.
First on the schedule was Dr. Jim Dwyer’s fairly new garden
in Foley, near Week’s Bay. Almost
sixty members turned up at Jim & Eileen’s to view a large collection of
different camellia species, an extra
bonus was the great variety of scented forms available.
The garden was in two parts, one around the Dwyers’ home and the other about
half a mile away on a separate lot which Jim has landscaped. It was a lovely afternoon, plus the visitors learned a lot. The second tour
was of the older camellias planted in the l960’s at the University of South
Alabama. This tour was hosted by
President Brenda Litchfield
with seventeen members taking the tour. It
was a pleasant days stroll with members giving their opinions on what the various plants
were, as few had name tags on them. Since
Becky Root, Blanding Drinkard and Rick Crow were among the visitors we may have managed to
name some of them for Brenda and the University. The third and last
tour was of Earl and Margaret Comstock’s lovely garden near Glen Lakes Golf
Course just south of Foley. There
were thirty-six people
on the tour which was quite impressive since the Comstocks live further from
Mobile than almost any active member. Again we were lucky to
have a brilliant day and saw an amazing collection of different camellias, from
brand-new ones to huge high and wide trees. Earl and Margaret
have an enormous specimen of the white “Lotus” camellia which is quite
jaw-dropping. Several of us just
stood and drooled over
it. If it wasn’t so darned
big, I’d consider doing a bit of camellia-napping.... So our thanks go
to Jim & Eileen, Brenda, Earl & Margaret, for opening
gardens for our enjoyment, and to Vickie Baugh for organizing yet another successful
season of Garden Tours.__________________________________________________________________ CAMELLIA CHAT..... IMPORTANT:
The Club will be ordering some more copies of the latest (2006) Camellia
Nomenclature Book -$12.00 and Supplement -$5.00 immediately after
the March Meeting - so if you want one or both let Vera Curry know at the
Meeting, or telephone her with your order at 251-986-8501.
There are no plans to issue a new Nomenclature in the near future, the
Supplement contains all the older varieties that were removed from the
regular Nomenclature Book after
1981 - most are old varieties bred prior to l950s. For those who
liked the embroidered camellia we gave Walter, the counted cross-stitch pattern
is called “CAMELLIAS” and is by Rose Mary LeBlanc Barton.
There are 8 different flowers in the pattern packet, plus you can do what I did
and change the coloring, I changed a light pink bloom to a dark
red one since I know Walter favors
the deeper red blooms. Can’t give you photocopies, it’s copyrighted..... |
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