Sacramento: La Dame Aux Camelias
In 1688 a man arrived in Luzon, an island that later became part of the Philipines, armed with faith, a keen eye, and the dedication and personal discipline typical of the Brothers of the Society of Jesus. Georg Joseph Kamel was born in Brno, Moravia, in 1661, joined the Jesuit Order, and was sent as a missionary to the East where he served until his death in 1706. He had the mind and the eye of a scientist in a time of great scientific upheaval. The world he left had no clear understanding of the world to which he was sent and this void was filled generally and amply by fear and ignorance. Nature and Father Camellus abhorred a vacuum, and he sought to fill this void with a meticulous study of the natural world he encountered. The first two collections of his writings and drawings were lost to pirates and to the sea, but the third attempt to send his work to the scientific community in Europe was a success and became the “Herbarium aliarumque stirium in insula Luzone Philippinarum”. Kamel dedicated himself to the study of Philippine botany and zoology and ran free health clinics in the Philipines until his death. His clinics, church, and missionary works are long forgotten, but Father Camellus was remembered for his contribution to botany by C. Linneaus, that Swedish namer-of-all-things. Kamel probably never saw a camellia since it is native to Japan and the eastern part of continental Asia, but it is good that such a lovely genus bears his name.
If you walk the streets of any Northern California town today you will see these heavy-blossomed shrubs in full glory. Red, white, pink, cream; solid, striped or palomino; single, double, fimbriata, “peony” or “anemone” forms, “rabbit ears”: there are over 10,000 varietals and even more obsessive growers worldwide. The camellia is a member of the Theaceae family of glossy-leaved evergreen bushes that have captivated growers in Asia and the West for centuries. Long admired in Japan and China, the first camellia was brought by the British East India Company to England in the early 1700s. That Company had an intimate and troubled relationship with a member of the camellia family, Camellia sinensis , from which black, white and green tea is produced. The more ornamental camellia cousins were brought back to grace the orangeries, the glass houses of the tea-barons of England. “Alba Plena” made the crossing in 1792 and others followed.
For Europe, the camellia became a symbol of the East, of luxury, of opulence and decadence. The camellia soon crossed the Atlantic, and followed the migration West. According to the Camellia Society of Sacramento, the first camellia to arrive in that city came from New York, crossed the isthmus of Panama, sailed north to San Francisco, and arrived in Sacramento on February 7, 1852. My ancestor may have been on the same boat, but he brought a dictionary, a machete, and a silver shot-glass, not camellias. The camellia was planted everywhere in the city but most were washed out and destroyed in the 1861-62 flood. That was the flood that forced newly-elected Governor Leland Stanford to take a boat from the upper floor of his home to travel a few blocks to the capitol for his inauguration.
In 1941 Sacramento professed its love for the camellia by declaring it the City Flower and the Camellia Society of Sacramento was formed in 1943 to foster the cultivation of camellias in the city. The Camellia Society will be holding its 87th Annual Camellia Show at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento on March 5-6, 2011. If you are interested in planting a camellia, attend this free event to help decide among so many exquisite possibilities. But if you just want to enjoy camellias, take a walk through Capitol Park where they are blooming now.
