A stroll through Camelie Locarno

Locarno has many calling cards: the film festival, Piazza Grande, the lakeside promenade, and more. But anyone who truly wants to understand the city in spring should visit the Camellia Park. There, among old Camellia japonica plants and cultivars with sonorous names such as Elizabeth de Rothschild or Marie Curie, Locarno tells a different story. One that reaches back more than a century.

When the camellias bloom in Ticino, a quiet, almost ceremonial atmosphere settles over Locarno. For a few weeks, the Parco delle Camelie becomes a meeting place for breeders, botanists, photographers and flâneurs from across Europe. Spread across around 10,000 square metres, more than 1,100 registered camellia varieties grow here, including numerous historical cultivars. The park was inaugurated in 2005 on the occasion of the International Camellia Society congress and today carries the label ​“Garden of Excellence”, an award for particularly significant plant collections. Yet titles and certifications fade into the background when the park transforms into a spectacular play of colour in white, pink and red.

Camelie Locarno – an exhibition with a past

For five days each March, the park becomes the stage for Camelie Locarno. At the heart of the exhibition is the presentation of around 250 varieties of cut camellias, carefully arranged and staged. Each blossom stands on its own, and yet together they form a panorama of shapes and colours. The fact that Locarno is now considered a camellia city is rooted in its history. The camellia arrived in Europe in the 18th century and likely found its way to Lake Maggiore around 1900 via nearby Verbania. In the villa gardens along the lake, a garden culture developed that still defines the region today. In 1923, the first Camellia and Mimosa Festival took place on the famous Piazza Grande – a spring celebration that laid the foundation for what is now Camelie Locarno.

Queen of winter

The camellia blooms when other plants are still dormant. From late winter into spring, it opens its blossoms as if gently bringing light back into the gardens. Botanically, five flower types are distinguished – from single and semi-double to anemone, peony and fully double forms. It is precisely this diversity that makes up much of its charm. No bloom resembles another, yet all appear complete, sometimes almost artificially perfect. Perhaps it is also the names that contribute to this aura: Tiffany, Madame Curie, Elizabeth de Rothschild, My Darling, Metallica or Show Time. Many of these cultivars date back to the mid-20th century, a time when camellia breeding in Europe and America reached a new peak. They show that the history of the camellia is not only long, but continues to be written into the present.

When blossoms become music

But what makes Camelie Locarno so special? Certainly the atmosphere plays a role. Away from the large tourist crowds, the camellia park feels like a place of deceleration. One does not simply walk here; one moves almost reverently through a labyrinth of blossoms and more than a century of garden culture. Between the trees, the view of Lake Maggiore opens up again and again, as if it were part of the staging. And sometimes, when music drifts from the pavilion – Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, for example – it seems for a moment as though the blossoms themselves were gently swaying in rhythm.

One flower, one idea

What began in 1923 as a spring festival is now an international exhibition. Yet the original idea remains – to celebrate spring through a single flower. Perhaps this is precisely where the magic of the event lies. Camelie Locarno is not loud, not spectacular in the conventional sense – but elegant, calm and entirely devoted to the beauty of the queen of winter. And so visitors leave the park with the feeling that in Locarno, spring does not simply begin – it is retold each year. In white, pink and red.

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