Look but Don’t Taste!

Marianne Groothuis is the Camellia and Theme Collection Curator at the Dunedin Botanic Garden

It’s mid autumn and the fresh fruit covering Camellia yunnanensis look good enough to eat. They could easily be mistaken for apples, except they are a bit small. Their skin is mostly light green with a blush of sun-kissed red on top.

Probably best not to sink your teeth into the fruit as it isn’t the sweet juicy fruit you’d expect, but a hard, dry, thick-skinned capsule. The ornamental fruit capsule ripens on the small tree for several weeks before splitting and dropping to the ground, releasing several large brown seeds.

Camellia yunnanensis is a species, occurring naturally in the wild.

Camellia yunnanensis flowers in the spring. The flowers are solitary and pure white, with a cluster of bright yellow stamens. The flower buds are fat and round, up to 2cm across just before they open. They then open into a single broad cup-shaped arrangement of 7-12 petals.

The bark of this camellia is a cinnamon colour with a velvety smooth surface.

•  C. yunnanensis grows in south west China, in the Provinces of its’ namesake Yunnan as well as Guizhou and Sichuan Provinces.
• It grows wild in mountainous forest and thickets at an altitude between 1100-3200 metres above sea level. As a comparison, New Zealand’s Mt Cook is 3754 metres above sea level.
• C. yunnanensis can reach from 1-5m tall and is slow growing.
• There are specimens of C. yunnanensis in fruit in the lower botanic garden Camellia Collection.