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A sasanqua's year has four distinct phases and each one sets up the next. It flowers through autumn into early winter, rests through the coldest weeks, is pruned and fed in late winter, pushes its growth flush in spring, and sets the buds for the next display through the first half of summer. Miss the summer phase and you lose the autumn display, even though the two are six months apart.
This is why generic camellia calendars are actively misleading for this plant. They put pruning in late spring and expect flowers at the end of winter, and following them on a sasanqua means cutting off the growth that would have carried the buds. Work from the schedule below instead, adjusting the seasons to your own climate by watching the plant rather than the calendar.
The two dates you actually need are the date the first flower opens and the date the last one falls. Everything else hangs off those. Once you know your own plant's flowering window, the pruning window is the fortnight after it closes and the critical watering window is the twelve weeks after the spring flush hardens.
| Season | What the plant is doing | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Early autumn | First buds coloring and opening | Keep watering, clear weeds, stop all feeding |
| Mid to late autumn | Full flowering | Water in dry spells, rake fallen petals if the season is wet |
| Early winter | Flowering tails off | Enjoy it, check container plants for dryness |
| Midwinter | Dormant, hardening against cold | Nothing. Protect containers from freezing through |
| Late winter | Dormant, buds not yet formed | Prune and shear, then feed and mulch |
| Spring | New growth flush extending | Water new plants, watch for aphids on soft tips |
| Early summer | Flush hardening, buds being set | Water deeply and consistently, treat scale crawlers |
| Midsummer | Bud set completing | Keep watering, take semi-ripe cuttings, no feeding |
| Late summer | Buds swelling quietly | Water in heat, watch for mites, do not prune |
Autumn and early winter: the display
Flowering starts in mid autumn and can run eight to ten weeks. Keep watering through it, especially in a warm dry autumn, because a plant carrying a full crop of open flowers is using more water than the season suggests. Bud drop during flowering is almost always a dry root zone.
Petals shatter individually as flowers age, so the plant stays looking clean and the ground beneath collects small pieces rather than whole brown blooms. In a wet autumn, rake the fallen petals up and bin rather than compost them, since petal blight overwinters in that debris. In a dry autumn you can leave them.
Do not feed at any point during flowering or after. Nitrogen now pushes soft growth that will be damaged by the first hard frost, and the plant has no use for it while it is flowering.
Late winter: the one week of real work
Once the last flowers have shattered and hard frosts are behind you, this is the moment to prune. Take out dead, damaged and crossing wood, thin the interior to let light in, and shear formal shapes and hedges back to just short of last year's line. The plant has the whole spring and early summer ahead of it to make the growth that will carry next autumn's buds.
Immediately after pruning, apply the annual ericaceous feed and top up the mulch to two or three inches (5 to 8 cm), keeping it an inch clear of the stem. Doing all three jobs in one session means the plant gets nutrition and moisture retention exactly when it starts to grow.
This is also the time to plant new sasanquas in cold climates, and to lift and pot up any layers you started the previous spring. Both jobs want a plant that is dormant but about to move.
If you are late and spring growth has already started, prune anyway rather than waiting. Pruning as growth begins costs you a little vigor and delays the flush, which is a much smaller price than pruning in early summer and losing the buds entirely.
Spring and summer: the invisible work
Spring is easy. The growth flush extends, aphids may appear on the softest tips and can be rubbed off or washed off, and newly planted shrubs need watering whatever the weather because their rootballs dry out faster than the ground around them. Established plants in the ground need almost nothing.
Early summer is the period that decides next autumn, and it is the one that gets neglected because there is nothing to look at. From the moment the new leaves harden, keep the root zone evenly moist for the following twelve weeks. A deep soak every four or five days in hot weather is more useful than a daily sprinkle. This is when the flower buds are initiated, and a plant that goes short now will flower thinly no matter what you do later.
Early summer is also the window for treating scale, when the crawlers are mobile and unprotected, and midsummer is the window for taking semi-ripe cuttings. Late summer is the time to watch for mite damage in hot dry spells. What you must not do at any point from early summer onwards is prune, because from that point the buds already exist.
Build your own calendar from notes
Keep four dates each year and the whole schedule becomes yours rather than generic: first flower open, last flower fallen, date pruned, date of the spring feed. Add a line on whether early summer was dry and whether you kept up the watering. After two years the pattern between summer water and autumn flowering will be plain in your own notes.
For plants in more than one position, note them separately. A sasanqua in full sun typically opens earlier and flowers more heavily than one in shade a few yards away, and knowing that from your own record is what tells you whether a disappointing plant has a light problem or a soil problem.