To know to what extent reproductive shoots are autonomous in Camellia sasanqua, we manipulated the sink-source balance between the reproductive shoots and their adjacent shoots by selecting vegetative or reproductive adjacent shoots, or defoliating the reproductive shoots, and photosynthetically labeled adjacent shoots with (13)C. The atom% of (13)C did not increase in the unlabeled shoots that had leaves, whereas that in the defoliated, unlabeled shoot was significantly increased. These results indicated that the pattern of translocation of photoassimilates to adjacent reproductive shoots occurs depending on the sink-source balance between shoots.