I Can Buy Myself Flowers (But I’d Rather Steal Them)

It’s peak season for sneaking around Savannah’s yards, which means every surface of my house is covered in glass dishes displaying petals of riotous color and variety. Who needs roses when camellias are basically nature’s Valentine? 

I’ve got flowers in my hair and pinned to my shirt, and friends and strangers alike receive a bloom with every interaction. (The mailman thinks I’m nuts, but I made the checkout lady at Red & White smile.)

Oh yes, I’ve been poaching aplenty these past weeks, and I make no apologies. But what’s curious about being a notorious camellia thief is that I actually now get invited to purloin on private property — sometimes in some of Savannah’s most storied gardens.  

I’m not kidding…EVERY surface

For years I’d heard about the magnificent copse on Isle of Hope planted over a century ago by Judge Arthur Solomon, a longtime public servant and one of the founding fathers of the American Camellia Society. “The Judge” as he was known (he never presided over any court, it was the honorific bestowed upon county commissioners back then) was so deeply obsessed with his favorite flower that in the late 1930s — not long before Hitler charged in — he traveled to the famed nurseries in Nantes, France and brought 200 peat moss-packed saplings back on the Queen Mary.

The 50-odd survivors of that journey were added to his glorious forest on the marsh, first purchased as a sprawling 40 acres in 1911 but eventually truncated to a moss-draped expanse of 11 acres. Each winter the Judge would invite the public to marvel at the hundreds of exotic specimens  — amounting to more than 1300 trees and shrubs — and generously hand out cuttings in what seems to have been a lifelong mission to cover all of Savannah with the world’s most wonderful perennial.