Add this multi-season stunner to your landscape and revel in your good decisions and finer taste in all things naturally glorious! Japanese Stewartia earns its keep in the garden year-round; valuable as a specimen tree in the lawn or shrub border, it offers long-term impact in the landscape with its summer flowers, brilliant autumn color and exfoliating bark that provides dramatic winter interest.
The tree has a pyramidal shape in youth that gives way to a more rounded and open appearance with maturity. Japanese Stewartia is one of the few trees that bloom in the summer, producing a succession of camellia-like white flowers with gold anthers for more than two weeks in July. In the fall its lustrous green summer foliage turns to shades of yellow, red and reddish-purple.
Underplant with shade-loving, long-lived perennials: golden Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola'), Hosta (H. 'Liberty', H. 'Kabitan', H. 'Halcyon'), shiny Beesia (Beesia deltaphylla) and assorted Epimedium cultivars. In the winter, its patchwork bark pattern stands out against the snow and clear blue sky. This naturally well-shaped tree is one of the most desirable small- to medium-sized specimen trees around.
To see it is to love it and to love it is to plant it....in well-drained humus rich soil in a sunny spot with some afternoon shade. You will be rewarded with years of stunning beauty. It reaches 30-40 feet at maturity and has no major disease or pest problems. It is somewhat pricey, but the distinct contribution it provides to the four-season landscape makes it a garden gem.
Woooooow