Waypoints: The Moorings' Camellias

I've been spending some time this winter helping my brother Derek tend to the camellias in the greenhouse of the Moorings on Converse Point.

Derek pruning extra buds...

In the dining room of The Moorings, right beside a portrait of our great-grandfather Elisha Slade Converse, a door opens into another world...my grandmother's greenhouse, an amazing, rich, damp, fertile Eden in which to hide and play with dirt when we were kids.

One room contained (still does) sixteen tall camellia trees with dark shiny green leaves and blossoms that bloom all winter. It was a moment of magic for a child then -- and I'll admit, an adult now -- to pass through into that utopia on a cold snowy February day and see such delicate beauty, safe and moist and warm, while inches away from a raging northeast blizzard just outside the glass. I loved going into that greenhouse, felt somehow secure and beautiful in the face of the storms raging around me both outside the house and in...

Later, when I was older, that greenhouse held beautiful and impressive (I thought) gifts for the few girls I shyly courted and loved as a teenager. My grandmother had a stack of special boxes for them, cardboard, with clear cellophane tops with "The Moorings" in cursive script across the pane. Into each box on special occasions, went 4-6 of those lovely delicate flowers, sprinkled with water to keep them moist.

The camellias came from China with my grandparents, who had been honeymooning there in 1919-1920. Long before the Dept. of Agriculture put its restrictions on importing nefarious flora, it was easy for my grandmother to slip four small camellia plants into her steamer trunk, and when they built their summer home in Marion shortly thereafter -- which she designed, by the way -- she convinced her young husband to include the cost of a home for those little plants in his budget for the house.

As the plants grew, her gardeners, first Tony Cruz and then Domingo Nunes, got interested in propagating and grafting the original four plants, which I suspect were all a pale pink or red color, and today those four little sprigs have grown into 16 trees, each 10-12 feet high. And the flowers, which bloom from December to mid-March! Deep red, brilliant white, some with yellow centers, delicate shades of pink, and -- my favorite -- peppermint, with streaks of pink on a white background.

Peppermint Camellia

As I write this in mid-March, the blooms have mostly passed, and now it's time for pruning, fertilizing, and getting rid of any little bugs that like to make their homes on those dark glossy leaves.... But December will come again, and with it next year's beauty...