World of camellias
Annual show at Rural Life Museum to feature collection of global flowers
Visitors to the 41st annual Baton Rouge Camellia Society Show at the Rural Life Museum will drive past what former resident director of the Burden Center Pat Hegwood calls one of the best private collections of camellias in America.
The free show is open to the public from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Feb. 18 and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Feb. 19. People with camellias in their yards are invited to enter blossoms in the show.
Moving almost 500 camellias from the yard of the late Violet and Henry Stone to Burden Center, where the Rural Life Museum is situated, was one of the best things that happened during his tenure as director at Burden, Hegwood said.
“It put the Burden Center on the map in the camellia world,” said Hegwood, who’s on the American Camellia Society’s board of directors.
“There are lots of private collections” of camellia bushes, Hegwood said, “but Vi Stone’s was special because she collected so many in her travels. She had camellias growing in her yard” on Oleander Street “that weren’t growing anywhere else in the country.”
The Stones were known as the owners of a jewelry store in Baton Rouge, but people around the world knew them as camellia collectors.
As vice president of the International Camellia Society, Violet Stone traveled to Britain, the Channel Islands, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan and Korea to collect camellias.
Her husband made some of the trips, but daughter Stella Stone Cooper made the Asian trips and other places where Henry Stone didn’t speak the language or like the food.
Starting at the bend in the driveway at Burden and extending, with breaks, to the Rural Life Museum, Stone collection camellias are arranged in “rooms” or groupings.
Not far into the line of outdoor garden rooms are Violet Stone’s Higo camellias.
Higos come from the Japanese island of Kyushu. The blossoms were the emblem of the Samurai warrior’s courage. The camellia was planted on the warrior’s grave. Many old varieties have been reintroduced from cemeteries.
Stone had 32 varieties of her own, naming them in honor of people she knew. “Willard Scott” was named not for the weatherman but the Stones’ longtime gardener. Stone named one of her introductions “Honeyglow” in honor of her husband.
Stone, who planted her first camellia in 1946, died in 2001 at the age of 89. Henry Stone died in 1999 at the age of 92.
He was born in Syracuse, N.Y., and met Violet after coming to Baton Rouge in the 1930s to open a Houston jeweler’s store.