Maybe not the best time of year to be camellia hunting :-) Most nurseries will offer the best selection closer to their bloom time - sasanquas in fall and japonicas and other hybrids late winter into spring. It's hard to justify tying up inventory dollars in plants that tend to be very seasonal in appeal, as many flowering broadleaved evergreens seem to be, so in the off season (for the camellias, anyway) what you will most likely find now are last season's leftovers.

And you may very well want to seek out a camellia speciality nursery if you are hunting very specific cultivars - camellias may be exceeded only by daylilies by the hundreds of cultivars on the market and most local retail nurseries will offer only a few of the more popular varieties. FWIW, trends and fashions in plants seem to come and go just as they do with other products and currently camellias do not seem to be a high fashion plant item :-)

Too true, GardenGal... I really need to just cool my heels until fall and probably do a mailorder. I have a big yard just being fought into cultivation and I am impatient to get it going. I know I want camellias for a certain sheltered, dappled corner of the yard and so of course I want them now!

I know what you mean about the "fashionable" plants. I don't want to grow what everyone else in my neighborhood is growing so I generally do end up hunting online for my collection. I was just hoping for an exception! :)

The more I research and learn about all the different varieties of plants available (daylillies are a good example) the more boring many nurseries seem, don't they? I do understand, however, their need to cater to the general public.

Thanks for the sanity check.

Look at a copy of PLANT LOCATOR - WESTERN REGION sourcebook.

If you define "boring" as not carrying 100's of different daylilies, ditto camellias, rhodies or any other relatively common garden plants that have been bred and hybridized into the stratosphere, I'm not sure I'd agree. Boring to me is a nursery that never offers the unexpected or the less common - no new introductions to trial and experiment with, no uncommon trees or shrubs, no marginally hardy imports from the Southern hemisphere to test the bounds of hardiness, no cool tropicals to entertain me in summer, no strange Asian woodland plants.

Of course nurseries have to cater to their buying public - not to do so is to risk discouraging those who are their bread and butter, Joe and Jill Homeowner needing attractive, reliable, tough performers to make their gardens. But a smart nursery understands how many collectors and sophisticated gardeners are out there and how willing many of them are to drop a bundle on something new and unsual for their garden. The key is to be able to offer enough of a selection of the standards together with all those other very cool plants the non-gardeners overlook but the afficionados beat down the doors for. Not always an easy balance to achieve given limited space, limited inventory dollars and the fickle moods of gardeners :-)