The Deed Is Done

I collected camellias from various persons. Our friends have a gorgeous red camellia that weathers to a velvety pink.

Turns out that our trees are so direly dweeby that it took hours to find the right places to graft. What I see happening in our trees is that last year's pruning has really produced some growth. But that made me not want to disturb it, so I did less grafting than I had hoped. Next year, though!

This tree had such tiny branches. I learned a lot. Realized that none of my plant materials resembled the examples I was seeing in videos, and now I understand why people like to graft and demonstrate grafting on younger plants rather than on established trees. So I did a few tiny grafts, and we'll see whether they take. One thing that I've heard happens is that a graft may fail but it may stimulate growth at the same time, so there can be a nice trade off.

By the way, I've decided that I actually like our camellia blossoms now. I just wish I had more of them.

Here is my fanciest graft. Two different varieties in a cleft graft on one branch. Wrap that puppy up with grafting tape, trim the leaves to half a leaf and you're good to add a wire cage and plastic.

 
Here is my pride and joy -- a pile of discarded Chinese New Year lantern innards that I turned into wire cages. The wire cages and plastic create a humidified environment for the grafts.

This is the one camellia tree, with a tent over the graft.

And now we wait 4 months. By then my fingers should be healed from using tin snips, grafting knives and the other pointy objects required for this work. It was fun.