Winter's Star

This is the Winter's Star hardy Camellia. It is growing in a container on my apartment porch. It is not my first Winter's Star. I left my first when I left my house. I had it for ten years, and it had grown 6 feet high and 8 feet across. It bloomed in October and lasted through November, and I loved it dearly. The more spectacular Camellias Japonica and Sansanqua are not for Middle Tennessee, but Winter's Star is a hybrid of the cold-hardy Camellia oleifera and will live and blossom in Zone Six. To me it is the soul of Autumn now, just like the sprays of blue Aster cordifolius on the woods' edges, and the scent of fermenting wild persimmons, and the lonely star Fomalhaut rising nightly in the east.