Updated February 6, 2006 at 11:58pm: Found the label, and my tentative identification was correct.
I couldn't find a label on this camellia in the winter garden, but based on the location, the plants in the location, and a bit of sleuthing I'm fairly confident it is Camellia sasanqua 'Setsugekka'.
As a name, setsugekka is composed of three parts: snow (setsu), moon (getsu), and flowers (ka). “Setsugekka no toki mottomo kimi wo omou”, from an ancient poem, translates into When I see the snow, moon, or flower, I always think of you. (source). Yasunari Kawabata, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, discussed the phrase setsugekka; Professor Isamu Kurita goes into more details in an article entitled: “Japanese Art and the Japanese View of Nature”.
Botany resource link: Economic Uses of Algae, a small site produced by the Smithsonian Institution. The secondary products pages are worth a read.
One - I find it fascinating that kelp is an algae. Algae in my midwestern backyard pond forms strings, but I never imagined those kelp forests to be algae. All a matter of scale, I suppose.
Two - All the uses for red algae! Isn't red algae the one that blooms under the El Nino, causing the dreaded red tides? Or am I thinking of something else?
Hey Jenn, there certainly is a lot of diversity within algae, and I'll need to feature them more often.
You are thinking of something else with regard to “red tides”. The organisms responsible for that phenomenon are dinoflagellates, whereas the red algae referenced in the link are members of the Rhodophyta.
Thank you. I love this site.
Camellia sasanqua Z6-8 - A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants, Brickell, Cole, Zuk
Camellia ka-mellee-a - after George Joseph Kamel [or Camellus] [1661-1706], pharmacist who studied the Philippines flora. sasanqua sa-sang-kwa - the Japanese name. Dictionary of Plant Names, Coombes