After a few years, I’m starting to write about our garden again. And it’s a new garden! Last summer, we moved to Fair Oaks, a sweet, older suburb of Sacramento. This house is a little over 50 years old, a nice rambler in a solid neighborhood. We’re enjoying discovering its garden secrets as they unfold. And lately, it’s camellias! We have five different varieties, including one we just bought a few months ago (Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’ in the fourth picture below). Of the established shrubs, they’re just starting to near their peak — one has been blooming since early December (slowly), and the others just opened up this week. It’s nice to have all of these beauties in a place that is sometimes called Camellia City. Many thanks to the previous owners for planting these!

Like all camellias, these thrive in soil with some acidity. It’s good to know our soil supports them, because some of this region has alkaline soils. We also have some Japanese maples that benefit from the acidity. After they’re all done flowering, I’ll fertilize around them with some acid fertilizer to get them ready for next year’s blooms. I’m also waiting to do some pruning until the flowers are spent.

Hey, did you know that black and green tea come from a camellia cousin? Someone tried making tea from Camellia japonica (the common garden camellia), and it’s an interesting read!

And wow… the last time I wrote here, we were still a commuter couple, living in Utah and California. Later that year, we consolidated in the Utah home, which was a great house, with important family and career reasons to be there, but being two Californians who love to garden, we found the climate a little tough. In early December, 2016, sitting in our living room with three feet of snow in the front yard and a blizzard coming down, we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go back!” That set some wheels in motion, and I decided to “retire” from my 16-year post as leader of a wonderful, nonpartisan public policy think tank in Utah, and by summer, here we were. Anyway, we have a lot more garden info to share with you, so look for more to come.

Post comments with questions about camellias or suggestions of other Sacramento region gardening questions you have. It’s great to be back!  :)