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BACK TO THE ALLEGHENIES
The next week was spent in a run north through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia and back south into Tennessee and North Carolina in quest of late forms of R. calendulaceum and of northerly R. arborescens and viscosum, wherever it might occur. A last visit was paid to the late red azaleas of Kentucky's Big Black Mountain and more of the Cumberland Azalea was found in Wise County, Virginia, but farther east at elevations of 3000 ft. and above it gave way to the late phase of R. calendulaceum, mentioned earlier, which was also of plentiful occurrence on the high points of the Alleghenies from Grandfather Mountain and Mt. Pisgah, west to the Tennessee border. Throughout this tour the Sweet Azalea was fairly plentiful along streamsides of the upland valleys and in some places, as at Mountain Lake, Virginia, and on Great Pisgah in North Carolina, it was hybridizing freely with R. viscosum to produce variable and often pink-flowered hybrids quite similar to entire populations seen in northern Pennsylvania a month later.
The Sweet Azalea tends to be quite variable, in certain characteristics and throughout its range from New England to Georgia and Alabama. It may be variable in habit from low, widespreading and bushy in open places to tall and leggy in denser woods; its foliage may be glaucous beneath or entirely green; its corolla may be pure white or carry yellow blotches of varying intensity and in flower size it may be a plant of mediocre attraction to one of quite outstanding quality. A clone with especially large and showy flowers was found on the east fork of the Pigeon River in Pisgah National Forest but others almost equally good were seen at intervals. Such individuals from the horticultural standpoint were quite superior to over-extolled “var. Richardsonii” of Wayah Bald whose flowers are medium in size and whose dwarfness seems a product of wind-swept exposure which is not expressed in the forest shelter at a few feet lower elevation.
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