Japanese Camellia Camellia japonica Black Tie

Black Tie sits at the formal end of the dark red japonicas. The blooms are small to medium and built in tight overlapping ranks, regular enough in outline to look machined, and deep enough in colour to read as near black where the light is low. The bush behind them is upright, dense and narrow in the shoulder, which is why it takes to a clipped hedge or a standard instead of sprawling the way looser reds do. It is a plant for a shaded courtyard, a narrow screen, or a position where somebody will stand close to the flower.

Aspect decides the flower

Dark camellia petals absorb heat, and this is the cultivar where that matters most in practice. An afternoon of direct western sun turns the edge of an open bloom brown and papery within hours, and reflected glare off pale paving or a rendered wall does the same thing more slowly. The plant itself survives all of it. The flower does not, and a Black Tie in the wrong aspect never looks like the photograph that sold it. Plant it on the eastern or southern side of a wall, or under high open canopy, where it gets morning light and nothing after the middle of the day. The same rule applies to a container: a dark pot standing in afternoon sun cooks the root ball as surely as the sun marks the petals, so put the pot where the plant wants to be rather than where the paving happens to be empty.

Growing it narrow

Temperate gardens across the southern states, the tablelands, and cooler elevated country behind the subtropical coast all suit it, with flowering running from winter into spring. Soil should be acidic and free draining, lifted with compost, mulched over the surface roots and never dug around. Water moderately and hold it steady through summer, because that is when the buds for the following winter are being made. The narrow habit is the reason to buy this one, so plant to suit it: 600mm to 700mm between plants gives a clipped line that closes over, while a metre lets each plant keep its own outline as a row of specimens. Do not crowd it tighter in the hope of a faster hedge, since slow to moderate growth plus a congested base produces a hedge that goes bare underneath and stays that way.

Black Tie or Great Eastern

Great Eastern is the other red japonica here and the two are not substitutes. Great Eastern carries large loose blooms on a bush that builds real width, and it is the one for mass, height and a boundary. Black Tie is smaller in flower, tighter in form and much darker, and it holds a narrow clipped line that Great Eastern will not. Where the flower is doing the work beside a door, take Black Tie; where the job is covering a fence, take the other. For the same formal double construction in pink rather than red, Desire is the match. Larger plants of this cultivar sit in the advanced trees grades.

Cutting and feeding a formal shape

Cut the moment the last flower goes over in spring, not a fortnight later. The following winter's buds sit on the growth that comes after that cut, so a summer or autumn tidy up removes them and the plant gets written off as shy flowering when the secateurs were the problem. Shorten leggy shoots back into the frame, thin the middle if it has closed up, and keep an established hedge on light clips. Japonica blooms hang on the bush and brown rather than shattering, so pull the spent ones off by hand as they go over; on a plant this formal, that single habit does more for the look than anything else on the list. A camellia and azalea food goes down behind the cut, and a second dose as the buds form, both watered in rather than left as granules sitting on dry mulch.

Choosing a size

This plant is available in 6 sizes, from 180mm up to 45L, priced from $36.95 to $259.00 per plant. The size shown is the pot the plant arrives in, which is the rootball, not the height of the plant. The smaller pots hold younger plants that cost less each and establish quickly, which suits hedges, screens and mass planting where the plant count adds up. The larger sizes carry several more years of growth on the farm and give height and presence straight away, which is what you want for a single feature position or a screen that cannot wait. Not sure which to choose? Read our guide to camellia hedges and winter flowers.