අක්කර 13ක කැමීලියා වවන දොස්තර

Retired doctor cultivates over 200 varieties of camellia in Yunnan

An 84-year-old camellia grower in the mountains of Kunming, capital of southwest China's Yunnan Province, has been bringing new blooms to life using techniques and experience gained over a long life of dedication and craft.

When Huang Wenzhong retired from a career in traditional Chinese medicine, he leased over 13 hectares of forestland on Woyun Mountain in the suburbs of Kunming to start his camellia garden.

"This is a wild camellia. It has small, single-petal flowers, and the colors are not ideal. But as a breeding parent, it carries the genes of the Yunnan camellia," said Huang.

Although around one-third of the world's camellia species grow in Yunnan, only about 10 percent of the more than 30,000 camellia varietals have roots in the province.

"By combining camellias from both China and the Western world, we can cultivate a new generation of superior varieties, allowing the descendants to outshine their predecessors," he said.

Over the past 27 years, Huang has grown more than 300,000 plants from 200 domestic and international varieties and his camellia garden is now recognized as an important breeding site and seed bank for camellia varietals.

Cai Yanfei is a research fellow at the Flower Research Institute of Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, who is working on breeding new, high-quality Yunnan camellia varieties through broader, inter-specific and inter-generic hybridization efforts.

After studying woody flowers such as rhododendrons and roses in her early years, she finally chose camellia as her specialism and has come to see Huang's garden as a research goldmine.

"There isn't any sticky substance on it, so you can’t pollinate it right now. Propagating Yunnan camellias is particularly difficult. Essentially, they can only be propagated through grafting, which significantly affects their overall application," she said.

Breeding camellias can be particularly challenging, as they grow slowly, blooming only once a year with only two to three seeds per pod, according to Cai.

Over 10 years of research, Cai has only developed three new varieties, and her admiration for Huang’s skill as a camellia gardener is blossoming.

"Mr. Huang's camellia garden is a natural seed bank for our breeding work and is where we perform our hybridizations," she said.

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