Ashley Fox-Smith
Camellia japonica, Bokuhan, or Tinsie drives a certain subset of gardening fanatics wild.
As has been noted before, the house we live in is quite old. Not fluted columns, brass plaque, Gone-with-the-Wind old—but old enough for wide porches, wavy window glass, square-headed nails, no insulation, and not a single door you can open without using two hands and, if it’s humid, a foot. A dogtrot farmhouse that has stood on a bit of decent West Feliciana farmland since my wife’s great-great-grandfather built it around 1890, our house was home base to four generations of farmers until my mother-in-law broke with family tradition by starting a magazine on the dining room table in the early ‘eighties. Being country people, what my wife’s ancestors did, when they weren’t farming, was garden. Some, like great-grandmother Irene—who was known as “Big” either because she was tall, or because she was a large and domineering presence not known to suffer fools (depends who you ask)—took gardening very seriously indeed. Apparently Big and great-grandfather Warren preserved domestic harmony by dividing the yard into “his” and “hers” territories—Warren planted annuals in the back; Big did things with perennials in the front, and to this day there are places where sticking a spade into the ground during spring will call forth a spray of long-forgotten violas that emerge like the echo from a former time.
Anyway, since she is not only descended from generations of fanatical gardeners but also tills the same patch of earth, my wife Ashley comes by her gardening obsession honestly. One species with which she has gone especially deep is camellias. This would have delighted her great-grandmother, who devoted considerable gardening energy to collecting and grafting camellias. Several of these survive in our yard today. What would not have delighted Big would be to see how many camellias her great-grandson-in-law has ringbarked with his weed eater over the years, so given her fearsome reputation, I’m glad our generations didn’t cross paths. Maybe this is why great-grandfather Warren stayed out of the front yard to begin with.
Long-dead ancestors aren’t the only benevolent spirits with whom Ashley communes about camellias. During a trip to Australia to visit my parents last year, Ashley and my similarly plant-fanatic mother had a bonding moment while visiting a lovely garden named Cloudehill, where she found an unusual variety named a “Tinsie” (or "Bokuhan") and was smitten. After cornering and interrogating the startled head gardener in his shed, Ashley returned to Louisiana determined to find a Tinsie of her own—a quest that has led her straight into the earthy embrace of the Baton Rouge Camellia Society.
She has found her tribe. At the Camellia Society’s annual show in February, my wife’s crusade quickly attracted an enthusiastic corps of retired doctors, horticulturists, and professors who have devoted considerable effort to helping her track down the elusive Tinsie. One of these knights in shining corduroy located a specimen in far away Forest Hill, then drove there to collect it. Another delivered it personally to our office while a third—who remembered Ashley’s aunts from the ‘fifties, when the farm kids from around here showed livestock for 4H—regaled her with stories about how all the boys developed a sudden enthusiasm for the beef cattle exhibit anytime the Woods girls turned up. Those Woods girls? Big’s granddaughters. How cool is that?
So the circle turns. As I write this there’s a strong, healthy little Tinsie sitting in a pot on the back porch. Ashley is waiting for a break in the rain when she can get outside and find it the right home. Big would be smiling somewhere. And me … I know where I won’t be weed-eating this summer.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
