Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus commemorates a Moravian-born Jesuit lay brother who ran a pharmacy and a botanic garden in Manila and who, for all his work on Philippine plants, never studied the shrubs that now carry his name. Its many {stamens} are not independent: the {filaments} merge low down into a fleshy ring that is itself fused to the bases of the {petals}, so the {corolla} and the boss of stamens are built as one piece. Every leathery blade sits singly along the twig, {simple} and finely {serrate}, and where the stalk meets the stem there are no {stipules} and no scar left by any. The fruit is a hard globe that dries and splits from the top into three woody valves, each chamber holding one or two plump brown seeds about half to three-quarters of an inch (1 to 2 cm) across. It is {evergreen}, holding polished dark blades through the coldest months, while the summer-flowering members of its family drop everything and stand bare behind peeling, jigsaw-patterned bark. In the wild it grows in the {understory} of broadleaved evergreen forest between roughly 1,000 and 3,600 feet (300 to 1,100 m) in Japan, southern Korea, Taiwan and eastern China. Wild plants open six or seven petals across 2.5 to 4 inches (6 to 10 cm), but centuries of garden selection have pushed cultivated forms to 3 to 5 inches (7 to 13 cm) in single, semi-double, anemone, peony, rose-form and formal double shapes. Because it flowers when almost no insects are on the wing, its {pollination} falls to small birds, and white-eyes and brown-eared bulbuls carry its pollen away on their foreheads. A soil-borne fungus that attacks only the blooms runs a chocolate-brown stain from the petal edges inward, which is why growers are told to gather and destroy every fallen flower. Most of its garden forms carry no scent whatever, a plain difference from the autumn-blooming sibling so often planted beside them. Oil pressed from its seed is a traditional Japanese dressing for hair and skin, a frying oil for tempura, and the standard rust-preventive wiped down sword blades and carbon-steel edges. Its epithet marks it simply as the one of Japan, where it has been bred in gardens for centuries, and its closest cultivated relative is the shrub whose young leaves are picked, withered and rolled to make the world's most-drunk brewed beverage after water.

Accepted Answer

Camellia japonica

Name That Plant #101