This beautiful flower is called a camellia. We have camellia bushes growing around our school, and they have pink and red flowers in the winter.

They make our school look beautiful.

But one day some people were greedy. They wanted to bring some camellia plants back to New Zealand, and they smuggled them in. They broke the quarantine rules.

One of these little baby plants had a disease, and when the plant grew, the disease spread to other camellia plants.

Now, there is a terrible disease called Camellia Blight in our country. It makes the flowers rot on the bush, and look ugly like these ones.

This means that people who sold camellia plants to other countries, following the proper rules, can't do that any more. We can't sell our plants to anyone because we have Camellia Blight in our country.