Rhodoleia championii Seeds | Hong Kong Rose

Hong Kong Rose (Rhodoleia championii) with pendant heads of rosy red tubular flowers in winter — Hong Kong Rose (*Rhodoleia championii*): Hamamelidaceae, the winter-flowering evergreen pollinated by birds.

LATIN NAME: Rhodoleia championii

COMMON NAME: Hong Kong Rose

Plant Profile

Hong Kong Rose is the winter paradox of the subtropical forest: an evergreen witch-hazel relative, five to ten metres tall, that opens its deepest rosy-red flowers in the coolest, dullest months. The blooms hang in pendant heads, each a rosette of many small cupped flowers clustered around a dark centre, swinging beneath glossy pale-backed leaves on short stalks, a construction that looks more like a waratah than a witch hazel.

In its home forests of southern China and Hong Kong the flowering coincides with the season of the flower-visiting birds, and the tree is one of the classic native plants of Hong Kong’s hillsides, where winter walks route past stands of it in bloom.

Science & Biotechnology

Its pollination biology is the reason the species appears in textbooks. Most witch-hazel family members are wind- or insect-pollinated; Rhodoleia is bird-pollinated, worked by sunbirds and by bulbuls that push into the pendant heads for nectar, and studies of its flower architecture, deep cups, red colour, winter timing and hanging presentation, document one of the clearest bird-pollination syndromes in subtropical East Asia. The fruit is a woody capsule that ripens over a year and opens to shed small winged seeds.

Systematically it sits at an isolated point in the Hamamelidaceae, its genus holding only a handful of species, and its winter schedule has featured in phenological surveys of how subtropical evergreen forest staggers its blooms.

Uses & Benefits

In the garden it is a specimen for the frost-light winter garden: glossy evergreen foliage all year, then the rose-red pendant heads when almost nothing else is out, working hard for winter honeyeaters and sunbirds in range and for human eyes everywhere it can be grown. It suits woodland-garden culture in mild climates and, like its camellia neighbours, resents drying winds.

Conservation collections hold the species for its restricted southern Chinese range, and its use as a native ornamental in Hong Kong public plantings has raised its profile far beyond its population size.

Growing from Seed

Collect seed from the woody capsules as they begin to split in late summer or autumn, sow fresh on the surface of a fine compost, and keep at twenty to twenty-five degrees with light. Germination runs three to six weeks and is respectable when the seed is fresh; the tiny seedlings establish slowly through their first year.

Grow them on in bright shade with the even moisture a woodland edge provides, pot on gently, and plant out when they reach half a metre. The species takes only light frost, a few degrees below zero briefly, and wants the wind-sheltered, humid conditions its forest home provides. Expect first flowers around the fifth to seventh year.

Our Take

A bird-pollinated witch hazel in rose red, flowering in winter: that sentence is the whole case for growing it. Fresh seed, humidity, wind shelter and a mild winter are what it asks in return.

Tree Seeds