Middlemist Red

Hey everyone! Welcome to floral weekends. For those who don’t know, this is a segment started by me where I write about some beautiful and strange flowers from all around the world. If you also wanna be a part of this, pingback to my blog and use the tag #floralweekends. This way we can enjoy a number of beautiful flowers.

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So today I have the beautifully stunning Middlemist Red Camillia. Its an extremely rare flower because only 2 flowers remain and are seen in two known locations in the world – New Zealand garden and green house of UK.

Source – chiswickhouseandgardens

Originally this plant was collected in China by John Middlemist in 1804. Eventually this became lost in China and was surprisingly cultivated again in gardens of London. Through a series of houses, this flower in London finally came into the hands of sixth Duke of Devonshire, housed in the 300ft-long (91-metre) conservatory, he added this to his great-grandfather’s Palladian villa, Chiswick House. The last news of its blooming came back in March 11 2010.

Chiswick House, 2010. Source – Dailymail.uk

Though with time, the conservatory couldn’t cope up with its past glory and lost itself to the neglect.  There was a lunatic asylum too and apparantly a bomb was planted there, but thankfully, it failed to explode and the conservatory was saved from total destruction.  With the help of local volunteers, camellia and the conservatory were restored. But it took botanists over 10 years to identify the flower’s species, while a few, about 7 are yet to be identified. And, it made up for the one of the greatest if not the most wonderful historic camellia collections.

The conservatory is currently home to 36 varieties of camillia and it took 3 years to identify the middlemist red variety. It was in 1999 that it was finally identified.

This flowers resembles rose in it full bloom. Its so pretty, I don’t really want it to disappear. Well thats all for this week’s Floral Weekends. Hope you enjoyed reading this.

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Source – Arena flowers.