Camellia

A broadleaf evergreen shrub from Japan, China, and Korea, grown for showy 3-5 inch winter-to-spring flowers in white, pink, red, yellow, and lavender against glossy, leathery, dark green leaves. The most widely cultivated camellia, with thousands of named varieties and a single straight-species form whose broad overlapping petals surround a dense boss of golden-yellow stamens. Winter hardy only to USDA zones 7-9, it needs moist, acidic, organically rich soil and the shelter of part shade.

Sasanqua camellia is an evergreen shrub native to the forests of southern Japan - Kyushu, Shikoku, and the Ryukyu Islands - where it grows on forest margins and hillsides. In gardens it is prized as the earliest-flowering camellia, bearing fragrant blooms from September through January when almost nothing else is in flower, and it tolerates more sun and drought than its cousin Camellia japonica. The honest catch is cold hardiness: open flowers are blackened by hard frost, and the plant itself is reliably hardy only from zone 7a south, making it unsuitable for much of the northeastern and midwestern United States without meaningful shelter.

Camellia sinensis is the evergreen shrub whose leaves, buds, and stems yield every style of tea - white, green, oolong, and black - and it is native to the monsoon-forest borderlands of SW China, Myanmar, northeast India, and mainland Southeast Asia. In gardens outside zones 7–9 it is too frost-tender to grow unprotected outdoors, and the honest catch is its unyielding demand for reliably moist, acid soil (pH 4.5–6.5): on anything alkaline or prone to summer drought it yellows, stalls, and refuses to thrive no matter how warm the climate.