Descanso’s crowning glory:

From the fragrant, fingertip-size buds of the “Lutchuensis” and the pink with white-edge “Cinderella,” to the large, porcelain-white, ruffle-petaled “Alba plena” variety, there is a veritable bounty of beautiful blooms to be found in the coming weeks as camellia season blossoms at Descanso Gardens.

Descanso Gardens — which is said to be the largest camellia plantation in North America — will host the Southern California Camellia Judges Symposium from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, as well as holding several camellia shows this month and into March. Descanso’s 160-acre botanical garden includes a 20-acre “camellia forest,” with about 35,000 tree-sized camellia plants growing under a canopy of 150-year-old oak trees.

The camellia area was created by Descanso Gardens founder E. Manchester Boddy, who began collecting species during the 1930s and increased his collection dramatically in 1942 when he purchased more than 100,000 plants from his friends F.M. Uyematsu, owner of the Star Nursery, and F.W. Yoshimura, of the Mission Nursery, who faced relocation to a wartime interment camp.

“I think you could say that camellias put us on the map,” said Mary Ellen Walker, public relations manager at Descanso Gardens.

One of Boddy’s first acquisitions was the “Alba plena” variety, Walker said. Though Boddy was warned at the time by some people that his flowers might not do well planted under the oak trees, Alba plena and about 650 other camellia varieties now thrive at Descanso with many blooms high in the branches of the tree-like plants.

Visiting Descanso’s camellias is a bit like going on a treasure hunt, said Descanso Gardens’ lead horticulturist Wayne Walker, (no relation co-worker Mary Ellen Walker). “There’s not a lot of the camellias blooming yet, but they are here, if you just look for them,” he said. “You just need to walk around and see what you find.”

One problem some visitors encounter on the “treasure hunt,” Wayne Walker added, is that people sometimes just don’t look up. “I’ve had people standing under a blooming plant and they are looking around near the ground saying they can’t see any flowers,” he said with a laugh.