Camellias bring their own bloom to annual show in Myrtle Beach area

Wintry weather has yet to really kick into gear across the Grand Strand and Lowcountry, but an annual event will be in full bloom for the weekend, with hundreds of flowers.

The Grand Strand Camellia Society will have its 12th annual Camellia Show, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 9-10 at Inlet Square, at U.S. 17 Bypass and U.S. 17 Business, in Murrells Inlet. Look for the meeting room between the mall’s center court and Belk. Admission is free, and everyone is encouraged to bring their camellias for display. Besides the 12 categories for judging, other awards include special designations, such as for novice growers, and a “Court of Honor.”

Mack McKinnon, the show chairman and a retired engineer, spoke of how camellias have grown into much more than a hobby for him, thanks to a late grandmother in Hartsville who grew the flowers “and got me into them.” They include a variety of hers “in my garden” today.

The camellia club also meets monthly, usually at the Georgetown County Library’s new Waccamaw Neck branch in Litchfield Beach, covering a variety of topics such as propagating and grafting camellias. At the session at 4:30 p.m. Jan. 11 at the library, Darren Sheriff, president of the Coastal Carolina Camellia Society in Charleston, will preview the National Camellia Show, which is 1-9 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Citadel Mall in Charleston.

Question | How many years have camellia shows been a rite of winter here?

Answer | The American Camellia Society was formed in the 1940s in Georgia, and camellias are popular up and down the East Coast and West Coast. We’ve had shows in Columbia since the 1950s, and I moved to Murrells Inlet about 14 years ago, and we started the club, then we began our shows for every winter.

Q. | What has made camellias command their own chapter or volume in the world of flowers and growers?

A. | The camellia is a winter blooming plant, which came from southeast Asia – China and Japan. Three hundred years ago, the English were buying tea from China, and the tea plant is in the camellia family, one of the species. The Chinese were not going to let the English get a hold of the tea plant. ... They didn’t get the tea, but they got the pretty blooms, and it spread throughout England and France, and then, it came to America. ...

In Charleston – at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens (843-571-1266 or www.magnoliaplantation.com) and Middleton Place (843-556-6020, 800-782-3608 or www.middletonplace.org) – they have a tremendous selection of camellias and many varieties, and Brookgreen Gardens, too (843-235-6000, 800-849-1931 or www.brookgreen.org), opened a camellia garden just last year (2014).

Q. | Do camellia growers share a mutual intensity and innovative drive in a flavor and fervor similar to enthusiasts for orchids or day lilies?

A. | It’s like orchids, day lilies, and irises, which have their own societies. We have thousands of members nationally and internationally, and a lot in China and Japan.

Q. | What new trends or colors in camellias have developed in recent years?

A. | I have a nomenclature book from the early 1950s that lists the varieties, with several hundred. The flowers today would number 8,000-9,000 in the book. It grew very rapidly, and people do a lot of hybridizing now. You can have a variety named after your granddaughter.

Q. | How easy or challenging is growing camellias?

A. | It’s not a hobby for me; it’s an obsession, but it’s a hobby for a lot of people. Camellias are really easy to grow, like mine, which like a little filtered shade, ... and there are other varieties of camellias that like more sunlight. They take minimal maintenance, and they start blooming in December, January, February and March ... when nothing else is blooming. A lot of people refer to a camellia as a winter rose; I like to call the rose a summer camellia. ...

Another interesting thing is with all the people moving here from Ohio, Pennsylvania and places up north, they find that the landscaper had planted camellias, and they wonder, “What the heck is this?”

Q. | With the spotlight sometimes cast on flowers in movies and on TV shows – such as the corpse flower in its rare, brief bloom cultivated by Mr. Wilson, played by the late Walter Matthau – have camellias ever enjoyed such a cameo?

A. | In an episode of “In the Heat of the Night,” Carroll O’Connor’s character made a comment during the arrest of a guy ... that “the camellias look really nice this year.” I remember that one.

This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 7:55 AM with the headline "Camellias bring their own bloom to annual show in Myrtle Beach area."