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In the Garden

A Camellia Preserve on an Island Known for Tabasco Peppers

Camellias often have showy blooms, some as big as plates, and the leaves can make tea. But their standout trait is their timing: they blossom in winter.Credit...Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times

AVERY ISLAND, La.

THIS island, 140 miles west of New Orleans, is best known for the Tabasco peppers that have been grown here since the 1860s by the McIlhenny family for their famous Louisiana hot sauce. But the three-mile-long island, surrounded by bayous, is also home to some 450 varieties of camellias, many rare enough to be considered endangered.

To identify these plants before they are lost forever, a handful of horticulturists, botanists and gardening aficionados converged on Avery Island on an overcast but mild day in January. Swatting aside beards of Spanish moss dangling from huge live oaks, the camellia sleuths were giddy over the brilliance of the blooms they discovered, with colors ranging from pure white to light pink to deep crimson, as well as marbled and striped varieties. Camellias, which have become more popular in recent years, have peony-like flowers that blossom in winter.

“There’s a Professor Sargent, that red one over there,” said Bart Brechter, the curator of gardens at Bayou Bend, a decorative-arts house museum affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. “It’s the strangest thing, I can’t remember people’s names but I can remember the names of plants.”

Mr. Brechter, like the other camellia experts assembled, was invited to Avery Island by the descendants of Edward Avery McIlhenny (1872 to 1949), who, besides running the Tabasco business that his father founded in 1868, cultivated and hybridized camellias. Mr. McIlhenny, who was known as E. A., set aside 170 acres on the island to indulge his hobby, calling the expanse Jungle Gardens and opening it to the public in 1935.

The beauty of his camellias, which were all labeled back then, attracted crowds and proved irresistible to some. “Over the years, visitors to Jungle Gardens took cuttings of camellias, and walked off with the tags that told us what we had,” said Leigh Simmons, 57, Mr. McIlhenny’s great-granddaughter and the overseer of the relabeling effort.

Ms. Simmons has spent much of her time writing locally produced plays, like one about the Louisiana Purchase called “Whose Land Is It Anyway?” But she also has a botany degree from Auburn University, a useful background for the camellia identification project, which is expected to take several years.

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Avery Island is home to some 450 varieties of camellias, many of them rare.Credit...Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times

Like many of Mr. McIlhenny’s descendants, Ms. Simmons lives on Avery Island, which remains family owned.

“We’re a commune,” said Cathy Thomason, 61, Ms. Simmons’s cousin, who is also involved in the camellia project. Ms. Thomason, who keeps a bottle of Tabasco in an engraved sterling silver sleeve on her dining table, became interested in camellias while participating in garden clubs in New Orleans, where she lived until she and her husband, Chuck, retired to Avery Island in 2003.

“We all come back eventually,” she said.

The two cousins enlisted the help of Mr. Brechter because Mr. McIlhenny had supplied many of the camellias now growing at Bayou Bend. Another key adviser on the project is Florence Crowder, a former nursery owner from Denham Springs, La., and a founder of the Great Gardens of America Preservation Alliance, established in 2008 to preserve rare and disappearing species of azaleas and camellias.

Camellias are native to the Far East but were exported in the 18th century to Europe, where they were grown in the greenhouses of royalty and aristocracy in France, England, Spain and Germany. In the United States, the heyday of camellias arrived in the 1930s and ’40s, when wealthy and notable Americans like Mr. McIlhenny, Henry du Pont, William Randolph Hearst, Pearl Buck and Eudora Welty began breeding and cultivating them.

With more than 17,000 varieties of camellias known today, identifying the ones on Avery Island will be difficult. During the January gathering, the identification process essentially involved Mr. Brechter, Ms. Crowder and assorted other volunteers crowding around a blossom and debating what it was. Nomenclature books, which are volumes that list botanical terms, were brandished, and occasionally heated arguments ensued.

At one point, listening to the bickering, Ms. Thomason dryly drawled, “I sometimes think whoever talks the loudest wins.” But usually, the disagreements ended with a notation of the plant’s location and the snapping of a picture of the bloom to send to other experts for their opinions.

“We’re all committed to this project because these plants are a part of our history,” Ms. Crowder said. “Many of the camellias are named after real people or places or events, so if you figure out the names of your camellias you can figure out your past.” There are camellias named for figures like George S. Patton, Pope John XXIII and Angela Lansbury, and, because it was considered a measure of social standing in the South to have a camellia named for you, there are countless varieties that honor former debutantes.

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“I sometimes think whoever talks the loudest wins,” said Cathy Thomason about the spirited debates among botanists at her family’s camellia preserve in Louisiana.Credit...Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times

The Avery Island effort is being closely watched by camellia enthusiasts, a group that is reportedly increasing. “I think more people are getting into growing camellias these days because they remember them in their parents’ or grandparents’ yards,” said Douglas Ruhren, a horticulturist with the American Camellia Society in Fort Valley, Ga. “They are like your grandmother’s china: you love it because it’s what she had.”

Some nurseries, like Cam Too Camellias in Greensboro, N.C., have seen a doubling of camellia sales over the last five years. Tommy Alden, the owner of Country Line Nursery in Byron, Ga., which sells camellias nationwide primarily to retail nurseries and landscapers, added, “Camellia sales have been the one bright spot in an otherwise down market.”

Besides nostalgia for grandma’s garden, experts say, the attraction of camellias is that they can bloom from November through March, when other plants are bare, and they are drought-tolerant and require very little maintenance. Indeed, the camellias on Avery Island have survived a half-century of benign neglect since Mr. McIlhenny’s death, not to mention multiple hurricanes.

And, said Mr. Alden, “There are also a lot of new varieties, some with blooms as large as dinner plates and others that will survive the cold.”

Indeed, camellias have traditionally fared poorly in hard freezes, growing well mostly in the South and on the West Coast. But now landscapers in the Northeast and Midwest are incorporating the new cold-hardy camellias into their projects.

“We’re getting a lot of oohs and ahhs over the camellias,” said Mark Butler, owner of Butler Landscaping in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., whose favorite varieties are Spring Promise, which has coral flowers, and April Snow, with stark white blooms.

Also popular are the sinensis varieties of camellias, the source of green and black tea. “People dry the leaves in the sun or in a 200-degree oven and then brew it,” said Cindy Watson, an owner of Cam Too Camellias. “We’ve seen a jump in sales I think because green tea is in everything now, even shampoos and lotions.”

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Credit...Sara Essex Bradley for The New York Times

Camellias are also in high demand among Asian immigrants in the United States and Canada, who often give the red blooming varieties as gifts. “We ship a lot to New York and California for Chinese New Year’s,” Ms. Watson said.

Back on Avery Island, Ms. Thomason interrupted the experts as they diligently examined the camellias in Jungle Gardens. “There’s a bee on a bloom over here if you want to get a picture,” she said.

“We’re not here for that sex stuff,” Ms. Crowder said. “We’ve got work to do.”

 

If the Bloom Is Off the Rose for You

Camellias, native to Asia, have become fixtures in the West ever since their introduction in the 1700s. Their leaves are dried to make traditional green or black tea, and many gardeners plant them for their showy winter blooms, which have a wide range of colors. Camellias thrive in temperate regions, but there are now also cold-hardy varieties that have expanded the growing range as far north as Canada.

Florence Crowder, a founder of the Great Gardens of America Preservation Alliance, said that although camellias have beautiful flowers like roses, “only camellias are easy to care for, don’t have thorns and aren’t ugly when they aren’t blooming.”

There are countless species in the genus camellia, but these three species (or hybrids of them) are the most common:

C. JAPONICA The most common ornamental species, it has large showy blooms, like a cabbage rose or a peony. The flowers fall off like a wilted pompon when spent, rather than shedding their petals one at a time.

C. SASANQUA Another ornamental, but its blooms look more like an antique rose with fewer petals than C. japonica and a prominent yellow stamen. The petals fall to the ground singly.

C. SINENSIS Also known as the tea plant, this species is the source of traditional black, green, oolong and white teas. It is squat and has small, fragrant white flowers.  

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: On a Bayou, A Census For Camellias. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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