The atmosphere during the early season of growth may almost touch saturation.  It must not fail to be genial, and this geniality of the air must be kept up by the surface-sprinkling of paths, floors, stages, walls, and the plants themselves at least twice a day.

With the pots or border well drained it is hardly possible to overwater the roots of camellias during their period of wood-making.  The temperature may range from 50 deg. to 65 deg. during most of the period.  As the flower-buds form, and become more conspicuous, the tropical treatment may become less and less tropical, until the camellias are subjected to the common treatment of greenhouse or conservatory plants in summer.  Even at this early stage it is wise to attend to the thinning of the buds.  Many varieties of camellias—­notably that most useful of all varieties, the double white—­will often set and swell five or ten times more buds than it ought to be allowed to carry.  Nothing is gained, but a good deal is lost, by allowing so many embryo flower-buds to be formed or partially developed.  It is in fact far wiser to take off the majority of the excess at the earliest possible point, so as to concentrate the strength of the plant into those that remain.

As it is, however, often a point of great moment to have a succession of camellia flowers for as long a period as possible on the same plants, buds of all sizes should be selected to remain.  Fortunately, it is found in practice that the plants, unless overweighted with blooms, do not cast off the smaller or later buds in their efforts to open their earlier and larger ones.  With the setting, thinning, and partial swelling of the flower-buds the semi-tropical treatment of camellias must close; continued longer, the result would be their blooming out of season, or more probably their not blooming at all.

The best place for camellias from the time of setting their flower-buds to their blooming season is a vexed question, which can hardly be said to have been settled as yet.  They may either be left in a cool greenhouse, or placed in a shaded, sheltered position in the open air.  Some of the finest camellias ever seen have been placed in the open air from June to October.  These in some cases have been stood behind south, and in others behind west walls.  Those facing the east in their summer quarters were, on the whole, the finest, many of them being truly magnificent plants, not a few of them having been imported direct from Florence at a time when camellias were far less grown in England than now.

In all cases where camellias are placed in the open air in summer, care will be taken to place the pots on worm proof bases, and to shield the tops from direct sunshine from 10 to 4 o’clock.  If these two points are attended to, and also shelter from high winds, it matters little where they stand.  In all cases it is well to place camellias under glass shelter early in October, less for fear of cold than of saturating rains causing a sodden state of the soil in the pots.