Birth flower for January 4
Camellia
Meaning: admiration and perfection
Linnaeus named the camellia after Georg Joseph Kamel, a Jesuit who studied plants in the Philippines — and the tea in your cup comes from a close cousin. In Japan, tsubaki flowers fall off whole, and samurai are said to have shunned them as a reminder of a severed head. In the West, Dumas’s novel The Lady of the Camellias made it a symbol of elegance and doomed love.