What you have is a beautiful bloom and a plant where you have to have a $30,000 greenhouse and a PhD to grow, says Tom Johnson, chief horticulturist at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. “You lose the beauty of the common ones in the wild or in people’s backyards.”

He is part of a group of individuals and 11 gardens across the South that have formed the Great Gardens of America Preservation Alliance to identify and preserve the so-called ancient or historic plants. Ancient plants are ones propagated before 1900; a historic designation is for plants from 1900 to 1960.

Organizers say their searches through public gardens will be the easy part of what will be a multi-year quest. The effort will get more complicated after that, because many of the plants may be nestled in private back yards and gardens.

There are thought to be about 470 ancient and historic camellias but fewer varieties, perhaps only about 100, of older azaleas.

Miles Beach, director of the camellia collection at Magnolia Plantation, said he hopes that within three years, more than 400 of the older camellias will be found. “Our goal is one day to have DNA samples of all the ancients so we can test modern plants and trace their DNA back and see where they came from,” Beach said.

A section of the gardens at Magnolia, where camellias first were planted in the 1830s – and at one time home to the world’s largest collection of azaleas growing outside – has been set aside to propagate the older flowers.

Azaleas are more fragile and were considered a gardener’s plant, not a show plant, so there tend to be fewer records about them, said Maartin van der Giessen, who owns an azalea nursery in Semmes, Ala. Based on catalogues from the 1890s, he estimates there are about 100 ancient azaleas, far fewer than the number of camellias, which had clubs devoted to their cultivation.

“We don’t have a lot of good documentation, but the house changed hands about 1901 and the new owners had cameras. They took these fabulous panoramic images of the landscape in which you see these very mature camellias and so we sort of post date from that point,” said Kathleen Jenkins, the park superintendent.

“It’s a treasure hunt,” she said, “and there is a danger of losing them.”