Planting a Camellia: Acid Soil and Why an East Wall Fails

The east wall is the worst place in the garden

The advice to give a camellia a sheltered wall is sound, and the wall people choose is usually the east-facing one, because it gets gentle morning sun and shade for the rest of the day. For a camellia this is the single worst aspect you can pick, and the reason is not the wall, it is the speed of thawing.

Camellias flower in the cold half of the year, so open flowers and swelling buds routinely take a frost. Frozen petal tissue survives that surprisingly well provided it thaws slowly. What destroys it is rapid thawing: the sun rises, hits the frozen flowers directly, and the cells rupture as they warm faster than the water in them can move. The flowers go translucent, then brown, within hours of a night that did the plant no harm at all.

An east-facing wall delivers exactly that, every clear cold morning, for the whole flowering season. A west or north-facing position gets no direct sun until the frost has lifted of its own accord, and the same frost passes without a mark. This is why a camellia in the shade often flowers better than an identical plant in a warmer, brighter spot.

If your only sheltered spot faces east, plant something else there. If a camellia is already in that position and browns every year, moving it is a genuine fix rather than a last resort. Camellias transplant well when moved in the period just after flowering, and the improvement shows in the first season.

Acid soil is not negotiable

Camellias will not thrive above about pH 6.5, and on chalk or limestone they slowly starve. The symptom is unmistakable once you know it: new leaves come through yellow with a network of green veins still showing, then the whole leaf pales, the shrub stops growing, and it hangs on for years looking miserable. That is iron chlorosis, and it is a pH problem rather than a shortage of iron in the soil.

Test before you dig, not after. A cheap soil kit takes ten minutes, and it is the difference between a shrub that looks after itself for thirty years and one that needs propping up forever. Take the sample from the depth the roots will occupy, around eight inches (20 cm), not from the surface where mulch and leaf litter distort the reading.

Digging a pit of acidic potting mix into alkaline ground does not work for long. Groundwater and rain move lime in from the surrounding soil, the pocket returns to the native pH within a few years, and the pit also acts as a sump that holds water around the roots. If your ground is limy, grow the camellia in a large container of acidic potting mix instead. That is a straightforwardly good way to grow one, not a compromise.

Look at what already grows well nearby. Healthy rhododendrons, pieris, heathers or blueberries in neighboring gardens tell you the ground is acid far more reliably than a single soil test. A district full of clematis, lilac and beech hedging on thin soil usually means lime.

Plant shallow, and never bury the trunk

Camellia roots are fibrous and run near the surface. Planted too deep, the shrub sulks for years and often dies slowly of collar rot as soil sits against the bark. The rule is that the top of the root ball should finish level with the surrounding soil, or very slightly proud of it, and never below.

Dig the hole two to three times as wide as the root ball but no deeper than the root ball is tall. Width helps the fine roots spread outward into loosened soil, which is what you want. Depth just gives the plant somewhere to settle into. If you dig too deep, firm the base back down before you set the plant in.

Autumn or the period just after flowering are both good planting times. Avoid planting into cold waterlogged ground in midwinter, and avoid planting in high summer, when a new root system cannot keep up with the water the leaves lose.

1. Soak the root ball first Stand the plant in a bucket of water until bubbles stop rising, usually twenty to thirty minutes. A dry root ball planted into moist soil stays dry, because water travels around it rather than into it.
2. Tease out circling roots If roots are spiralling around the outside of the root ball, pull several of them loose with your fingers and spread them outwards. Left circling, they strangle the plant years later.
3. Set it level, not deep Lay a cane across the hole to check that the top of the root ball sits flush with the surrounding soil. This is the single easiest planting mistake to make and the hardest to correct afterwards.
4. Backfill with the native soil Use the soil you dug out, improved with leaf mold or composted bark if it is heavy. Do not fill the hole with pure rich compost, which creates a soft pocket the roots refuse to leave.
5. Water in and mulch Water thoroughly to settle the soil around the roots, then mulch two to three inches (5 to 8 cm) deep over the root zone, pulled back an inch from the trunk.

Shelter from wind matters as much as light

Camellias hold their leaves all year, so they lose water through them all year, including on cold dry windy days when the frozen ground gives the roots nothing to replace it with. That is what causes the brown scorched leaf margins people often mistake for disease in late winter. A plant in a wind funnel between two buildings suffers this every year.

Give the shrub a back and a side: a hedge, a fence, other shrubs, or a wall on the prevailing wind side. Shelter also keeps the flowers on the plant, because camellia flowers are heavy and a windy site strips them within days of opening.

Allow for the eventual size when you choose the spot. Many camellias reach eight to twelve feet (2.5 to 3.5 m) in time, and while they take pruning well, a plant constantly cut back to fit a space flowers less than one with room. Give it four to six feet (1.2 to 1.8 m) of clearance from a wall or a neighbor.

The first two summers decide everything

A newly planted camellia has a root ball the size of its pot sitting in a large volume of soil it has not yet reached. Until the roots move out, which takes two full growing seasons, it depends entirely on you. Water it thoroughly once a week through both summers, more in a hot dry spell, aiming the water directly over the original root ball rather than spread across the bed.

Do not expect much flowering in the first year or two, and do not feed heavily to force it. A young plant that is putting its energy into roots is doing the right thing. The display arrives once it is established, and a shrub that was watered properly through those first two summers gets there faster than one that was fed hard.

Write down the planting date, the aspect, and the pH you measured. When a camellia disappoints five years later, that record tells you whether you are looking at a site problem you can fix by moving it or a season problem you can fix with the hose.

Mark the outline of the original root ball with a ring of stones or a shallow depression for the first two years. It stops you watering the wrong area, which is a surprisingly common way to lose a new shrub in soil that is damp everywhere except where it matters.