Green Nurseries - History of the Camellia

Having been around seemingly forever, we tend to think everyone knows about our business and its background. Fairhope, Alabama is no longer the sleepy little town of the 1960s, so please allow us to present a short history.

Green Nurseries began in 1932 when Bob Green, Sr. moved from Chicago to Fairhope, leaving behind the bleak winters for the Camellias, Azaleas, and other incredible flowering Southern shrubs that were almost unknown in the north. During the Depression, owning a nursery, meant, raising chickens and cows and cutting firewood on the side -- anything to put food on the table.

Curiously, Fairhopians in those early years, had very conservative tastes in plants and most sales were made from the back of a Model A Ford truck on the courhouse square in the county seat of Bay Minette. World War II disrupted the business when a simple "yes" to the question, "Can you read blueprints?" on a draft questionnaire led to four years of building ships and teaching blueprint reading during the day, leaving only late afternoons for growing camellias.

Green Nurseries grew after the war by shipping plants and the "new" centipede grass throughout the South. After Bob married the former Lillian Keller in 1948, the couple reared four children and thousands of shrubs and trees which are now heirlooms in many gardens around the Eastern Shore.

Bob Green's death in 1982 was a blow to the business but his lessons and influence in landscape design are still felt by the firm today.

In 1995 we began our wholesale division which now supplies camellias and other interesting plants throughout the Southeast.

Now the oldest extant business in Fairhope, Green Nurseries vows to continue to live up to the trust you have placed in us for over seventy years.

It wasn’t the plants that were so intriguing to me as a child; in fact, their demanding habits were often placed between me and the baseball game down the block. It was the old things. The abandoned tools of the 1940s that had been used to raise the camellias. . . the old grafting jars, large and small in many different colors. . . the label-making machine capable only of producing a handful of tags an hour. . . the “tree cart” that was often used as a stagecoach or chariot as my nurseryman father indulged my sisters and me. But the most mysterious of all was the “Rototiller” -- 1947 model, a monstrous seven-foot-long, 2-cycle, 16-horsepower machine that could turn the hardest clay soil to fluff.

My love of old things eventually and naturally extended into the garden itself. And what could be more interesting to study but the camellia? Here were actual living architectural artifacts! Crawling beneath old shrubs, once tended by gardeners now long-gone, could give you an insight into the gardener’s own spirit, with his labels frugally made from discarded Budweiser cans. The gardener/tool and die maker would stamp the heavy aluminum tags with care, and they remain as legible today as they were 40 years ago. Some labels, made by well-meaning amateur spellers, were so vague as to be almost in code.

Better than any other Southern shrub, the camellia can link gardeners with generations of the past. “My grandmother planted that camellia”, or “My uncle rooted that Japonica” are still commonly heard phrases.

Gardeners would like to think of their work as achieving some form of immortality, but of course a garden is a very fragile creature. Certain plants, however, seem immortal but for the hand of Man. I have rarely seen an old camellia die from any disease except “progress”. Personally, I am indelibly linked to my father by his camellias, some planted as early as 1932. As children, we would bring armloads of camellias into the house, and my father would rattle off the names: ‘Coletti’, ‘Marjorie Magnificent’, ‘Donckelarri’. My father died in 1982, and it seems he took many of his loves with him: opera, bad jokes, Nero Wolfe mysteries. But every winter I can still walk through the garden with him as he points out ‘Lindsey Neill’ and ‘Rose Dawn’.

And that other link: the Rototiller -- that hopelessly obsolete machine from the past? Every year or two I wrestle it from its cave, and clean the carburetor. A little new gas and three or four pulls and it sputters to life again, belching enough blue smoke to make Al Gore’s eyes water as far away as Washington. It careens around in circles, pulling my spare frame behind it. After five minutes of this ritual, I somewhat sadly wrestle the beast back into its cave, vowing that one day I’ll clean and renovate the machine that so faithfully helped put food on the table through nine presidents.

Sentimentality is a common link among all gardeners, both a comfort and a curse. I owe a great debt to my father for teaching me about camellias -- and of course, for not throwing out the Rototiller.

— Robert M. Green Jr

Wintergarden has categorized camellias into four distinct groups, which we believe will help both the serious collector and the casual gardener to identify, and perhaps even plan a landscape based on the plant’s origins and history.

The camellia arrived in Europe from the Orient during the 17th century, where it had been grown for centuries. It reached its zenith in the western world during the 1800s, when the entire continent fell in love with it. The plant with its lush blossoms and satiny deep green leaves was celebrated in art and literature during Queen Victoria’s reign, and was grown in quantities by the great nurseries of England, France, Belgium and Italy.

The camellia came to America early in the 1800s –probably as a mistaken substitute for tea seed. Soon, the popular ornamental varieties of Europe were imported and spread rapidly through the conservatories of the Northeast and the fabled Southern plantation gardens of Charleston, Mobile, Savannah and New Orleans. The blossom’s magnificence spread like wildfire, extending all the way to the West Coast before the Civil War.

The war and Reconstruction took their toll on many rare shrubs, and camellias fell from favor (or possibly were just forgotten) until the turn of the twentieth century. We have placed camellias from their American introduction until the beginning of World War I in the category we call Antique. These plants can still be found in Southern plantations such as Middleton Gardens in Charleston. In fact, you can grow an authentic living antique, as each camellia carries the same DNA as the original plant!

A new generation of plantsmen in the Southeast and on the West Coast imported quantities of seed from Japan and bred exciting new varieties following World War I. These varieties, along with the older Antiques, were planted widely throughout the Southeast and California. Many of these plants survive today in abandoned nurseries and neglected public gardens. In renovated older landscapes, they even thrive as trees. Camellias took their place as garden essentials during this period.

Camellias and camellia collecting vaulted in popularity during the 1950s. The American Camellia Society, founded in 1945, still thrives today in its promotion of the genus. Local, state and regional camellia organizations sprang up during the mid-1950s. The camellia industry could barely keep up with the demand, and the camellia show was the rage of the winter months. In fact, Bellingrath Gardens, once home to one of the finest collections in the world, had to use traffic policemen to help control the masses of autos visiting the cold-weather showcase.

New varieties in great number were produced during this period, but the burst of energy had its downside – many good garden varieties were overlooked in favor of the “show flower”.We are offering only the time-tested favorites from this era (1950 to 1959) while now evaluating hundreds of “found” varieties of the decade, many of which may be worthy garden subjects.

The modern camellias are often the result of careful breeding programs to achieve fragrance, color, cold hardiness or some other desirable characteristic. Many recent camellia introductions are outstanding as garden plants and yet are rarely seen outside collectors’ greenhouses. Often they carry excellent pedigrees of antique and heirloom parentage. They should not be confused with the difficult and demanding C. reticulata hybrids. While our focus is on the old, we find it hard to turn a blind eye to the wonderful work of many hybridizers who are still trying to create great shrubs with garden merit. This catalog includes only varieties we have evaluated for good garden characteristics.