Even as the group of flower aficionados flitted around a high-ceilinged room admiring just-clipped camellias with fanciful names like “Pink Lassie” and “Paradise Petite,” single petals floated lazily to the paneled wood floor, forming colorful mounds.

“You only have to look at a sasanqua and it loses its petals,” said Gianmario Motta, the president of the International Camellia Society and one of the world’s leading experts on the sasanqua, a camellia species native to Asia that blooms during the winter.

Indeed, these camellias’ star turn as the protagonists of the Winter Camellia Exhibition in Verbania, a northern Italian lakefront town not far from the Swiss border, was booked for a mere weekend, a brief moment in the limelight before they withered away.

But if the exhibit, showcased in a 19th-century villa, was necessarily short-lived, Verbania’s administrators have more ambitious plans involving a plant that has thrived on the lake since it made its first appearance here almost 200 years ago. In recent decades, the cultivation of camellias, as well as other ornamental plants like azaleas and rhododendrons, has become a mainstay of the local economy, while lush gardens and parks in and around Verbania have attracted legions of those who appreciate nature, particularly plants.