 |
| Camellia japonica 'Silver Wings' - 1 May 2026 |
One of the advantages of living in this century is our ability to instantly find the etymology of words. Some might say that knowing facts is not having knowledge. I would differ by saying that the association of a fact with personal experience becomes some sort of knowledge.
My mother and grandmother were born in the Philippines. Today I scanned this recently purchased Camellia japonica ‘Silver Wings’ for big coin. The flowers are 5 inches wide. I decided to look up the origin of the word camellia.
The word camellia originates from the Latinized surname of Georg Joseph Kamel (latinized as Camellus), a 17th-century Moravian Jesuit botanist and missionary. Botanist Carl Linnaeus named the genus in 1753 to honor Kamel’s work documenting plants in the Philippines, though the plant is native to East Asia. Wikipedia
So now I have this interesting association between the camellias that my Rosemary loved and my Filipino mother and grandmother whom Rosemary met in the late 60s and early 70s.
A fact that I happen to know about Linnaeus is that he named the sexual parts of clams for those of human women. I won’t explain further.
A further etymology of the Spanish word camellón which is the centre part that divides a two-way highway is that it indeed comes from the camel. Since the highway ridge is higher it mimics the camel's hump. Spanish for camel is camello.