Not sure,..could it be a crepe myrtle?

That is really beautiful but it's definitely not a Crape. Foliage reminds me of Azalea but the flowers don't.

Do I spy a nursery tag on that?

As usual, if the original poster would kindly give some information on the location of this plant (often she posts pictures from Asia) or where she got the picture from it might help with identification.

Yes, Esh Ga is right. The pictures were taken in Canton botanical garden. I will check to see the name.

Ok Esh, more pictures for our ID.

{{gwi:421493}}

{{gwi:421495}}

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I have no idea what it is, but I WANT ONE!

bboy, could you estimate the family?

do you have the name or not??? inquiring minds want to know..

if you dont.. try the name that plant forum.. and link us over there.. or come back and tell us .. life will not be the same.. if we dont know ... lol ..

ken

My original thought was that the buds look like Camellia.

The leaves in the first set of photos don't correspond to the leaves in the second set of photos, that's just my opinion though as obviously, the flowers do.

It's going to be Camellia or Rhododendron 'related', at a minimum.

Dax

I wouldn't count on that last statement being the case at all, too many structural dissimilarities are present. It is not exactly like anything I remember seeing before. If Canton is in a subtropical area, which I think it may be then this plant could be any of a vast number of tropical plant species (most wild plants are tropical in origin) including a great many not familiar to cold climate gardeners.

And since China contains the world's largest temperate flora it is still plausible that some new, completely different temperate species could still be brought out of a remote mountain valley or off a steep, never or seldom-disturbed cliff and displayed to western eyes for the first time.

Maybe, callistemon citrinus.

OR....Brownea Grandiceps.

Those are both quite different from this.

bboy, what did you do to my pictures :-)

Do you have Hamamelis virginiana?

{{gwi:421499}}

Wow, that is freaky. Looks like double helleborus flowers stuck into a Daphniphyllum. I almost wonder if it will prove to be in the Malvaceae...there's lots of strange tropical stuff in that family that looks nothing like temperate mallows.
I spent some time looking into Magnolias and Ericaceae. There are a few non-white magnolias but they are mostly known now...the obscure tropical magnolias that aren't in cultivation yet, aren't in cultivation for a reason. Nothing to look at in many cases. There are spectacularly weird tropical Ericaeae, but their flowers all look like fancy variations on blueberries/Pieris. It's hard to believe a Vireya could look like this.

Come on...someone must know!?

No idea. But I'd not call it 'very tall' - to me, that means over 50 metres tall. Which this isn't!

Resin

PS "If Canton is in a subtropical area"

It's tropical, not just subtropical: at latitude 23N, just inside the Tropic of Cancer (same latitude as Havana in Cuba).

Yes, I looked afterward at the web site of the garden to see if this plant was shown on it. I wonder when the same poster comes up with these kinds of pictures if the sites they lift them from has the botanical names shown in English characters somewhere.

It would sure help if they posted where they got them.

Some google-fu yielded the following solution:
Rhodoleia championii

It is of the Hamamelidaceae

THANK YOU! Your google-fu impresses me!
That's a hell of a witch hazel. UC Berkeley doesn't appear to have one, so that's pretty darn rare. Of all the RGBE multisite search sites, only the botanic garden of Smith College has one, under glass obviously.

It's in the 2002 Hillier manual, which has it marked (and described) as tender and says it was "First introduced in 1852".

Thanks, my ancient first American edition Hillier's says "suitable for the very mildest gardens" which makes makes me surprised not to have seen pictures of it at Tresco, and the fact it was introduced so long ago and later by Kingdon Ward makes it surprising it isn't in cultivation in the Bay Area at least.

Maybe nobody ever brought it here. Or it died out. Or some specimens are present but you don't know about them.

Many attempts to introduce garden plants to North America are first made on the East Coast, where most of the people are. If something can't live there it may be lost without ever having been seen out here.

You have a point there about plants in the Commonwealth world and their first introduction to the US. I found an obscure reference to Charles Sargent growing Senecio pulcher, presumably under glass, in Boston around 1910. It was almost 100 years before Annie's Annuals reintroduced it to the parts of the US (Bay Area, PNW) where it could be easily grown. I believe it had always been cultivated in the UK in those intervening years.

The late Marvin Black, former municipal arborist for Seattle called the phenomenon something like "the usual East Coast courtesy stop".

Shows recent offerings of the genus in Britain.

Here is a link that might be useful: 2 records for âRhodoleiaâ

The late Marvin Black, former municipal arborist for Seattle called the phenomenon something like "the usual East Coast courtesy stop".

LOL that's a good one. I'll remember that.

I recently have seen this plant or another species of Rhodoleia in a nursery. It is supposedly proving to be at least zn 8 hardy in North Carolina. You can expect to see it offered some time in the next few years.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Mon, Aug 4, 14 at 14:25

this species and the supposedly hardier r. henryi are available from several nurseries including woodlanders in south carolina and cistus in oregon. the tenderness factor may be at least partially due to tender lowland provenances being initially collected when the plant was first introduced. newer selections from higher elevations may be somewhat hardier than the old ones.

Nurseries Caroliniana seems to be offering Rhodoleia henryi 'Scarlet Bells'.

Here is a link that might be useful: Nurseries Caroliniana

This post was edited by dave_in_nova on Tue, Aug 5, 14 at 10:05

George, thanks, I didn't know it was already listed by those nurseries. Dave...yep, that's the link that was in my last post! I didn't see it at NurCar but that's where it came from.