The camellia with the strongest fragrance: delightful scent, beautiful as a peony, easy to care for, and it can be grown in the north too
Introduction
Potted plants are essential decorative touches for home life. Keeping some flowers and greenery at home brings many benefits: it beautifies the room and lifts your mood. "Flower Sound Potted Plant Diary, Issue 1364" introduces you to a camellia with the strongest fragrance.
Today's star
Camellia is one of China's top ten famous flowers, with a graceful tree shape and colorful blooms. It is highly prized in the horticultural world and is also a world-famous flower. The flower in the picture above is named "Xiangfei" and is currently the camellia variety with the strongest fragrance known, beautiful and aromatic, and very popular at home and abroad.
Xiangfei
Xiangfei may be the camellia variety most widely grown by flower enthusiasts in China. Its other names include Qianlixiang and Liexiang; they are all the same plant. Back then, many flower vendors in Suqian sold Xiangfei camellias as various famous camellia varieties, which for a time drew a flood of bad reviews and indirectly damaged this variety's reputation. But the fault was not the flower's, it was people's; the Xiangfei camellia variety is still very much worth getting.
Beautiful as a peony
Compared with the square, upright blooms of traditional famous camellias, Xiangfei's flower shape looks a bit "chaotic," somewhat similar to a peony, yet it still blooms with its own character. The flower color is pink, a medium-sized bloom, 9-10 cm in diameter, flowering from January to May, blooming diligently, with a new one opening as soon as one fades.
Easy to grow
Xiangfei is a variety hybridized and bred by a New Zealand horticulturist. It is very robust and highly adaptable to the environment, much easier to grow than native camellias, able to withstand low temperatures of -10°C, and it can also be grown in northern regions. Daily care is also easy, and it can be propagated by cuttings from branches. For beginners growing camellias, Xiangfei is a great variety to practice with.
One plant can scent a whole room
What Xiangfei is most praised for is its intense floral fragrance. Its scent resembles a blend of jasmine and rose, extremely strong. A single bloom can fill a whole room with fragrance, like a natural air freshener, with a delightful scent that refreshes the heart, letting you enjoy the flowers and the fragrance at once.
In addition, Xiangfei grows quickly, has good branching, tolerates pruning, is easy to shape, and is also excellent material for creating bonsai trees. It is worth having.