HAMMOCKSWEET
Returning to Mississippi on a stifling 18th of July with the thermometer hovering around 104°F. the first plants of true R. serrulatum, the Hammocksweet Azalea, were found in flower the day following on the edge of a wooded swamp in Jones County.(Through the following week and a half, it was chased in equally good flower into southeastern Louisiana, east around the Gulf Coast to within a few miles of Lake Okeechobee in South Central Florida, back to its type collecting locality in Lake County, Florida, north again to the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp and again east to Folkston, Georgia, and the type locality of Rehder's R. serrulatum var. georgianum. Throughout this thousand miles and more the Hammocksweet Azalea showed no excessive variation. At times it is true that its leaves or dormant buds became more silky pubescent, its flower pedicels varied from pale green to deep red in color and its flowering season was obviously
prolonged in lower Florida where single individuals may bloom from July to October or later, but essentially it remained the same sticky-tubed and rather inconspicuous little white azalea of the bog tussocks and the cypress islands of the southern waterways. At times it formed rounded bushes ten feet tall, but it was often low or producing but a few rangy stems seeking light through a dense cover of vine-covered holly or palmetto. The very late flowers of individual specimens could well be a characteristic worthy of exploitation in some future race of garden hybrids.
