It's probably best not to sink your teeth into the fruit as it is not the sweet juicy fruit you would expect, but a hard, dry, thick-skinned capsule. The ornamental fruit capsule ripens on the small tree for several weeks before splitting and dropping to the ground, releasing several large brown seeds.
Camellia yunnanensis is a species occurring naturally in the wild.
It flowers in spring. The flowers are solitary and pure white, with a cluster of bright yellow stamens. The flower buds are fat and round, up to 2cm across just before they open. They then open into a single broad cup-shaped arrangement of seven to twelve petals. The bark of this camellia is a cinnamon colour with a velvety smooth surface.
C. yunnanensis grows in southwest China, in the province of its namesake - Yunnan - as well as Guizhou and Sichuan provinces.
It grows wild in mountainous forest and thickets at an altitude between 1100m-3200m above sea level. As a comparison, New Zealand's Mt Cook is 3754m above sea level.
This slow-growing camellia grows to 1m-5m tall.
There are specimens of C. yunnanensis in fruit in the lower botanic garden camellia collection.
- Marianne Groothuis is the camellia and theme collection curator at the Dunedin Botanic Garden.
