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A FLORIDA START
The first azaleas or “Pink Honeysuckles” as a native of the South will always call them, were found with no little excitement along the edges of damp woods on the Florida side of the St. Marys River, along U.S. Route 1. They were plants whose flowers had deep pink tubes and pale to medium pink petals. The corolla tubes and often their supporting pedicel were covered with numerous little pin-head glands and the bud scales and unfolding leaves were hairy with a matted, silky pubescence. The only southern azalea with these several characters is R. canescens, the Florida Pinxter or Hoary Azalea and this indeed was it — as we (Chevvy and I) were destined to follow it for several weeks and over enormous distances.
At an appropriate spot, where azaleas were plentiful, my first “mass collection” of 25 or 30 flower-shoot specimens was made by random selection from as many different plants. Each specimen was recorded by number in a notebook; flower measurements were taken, flower colors, plant heights, location and growing conditions were recorded before the specimens were placed between newspapers of the collecting press. During the evening at some tourist court they would be rearranged before placement in the electric drier. Wherever possible, quantity collections of this sort were made at intervals of some 60 miles, with intervening “county collections” of a mere 5 to 8 specimens as more detailed indicators of distribution. A few run-of-the-mill small, living plants were taken at intervals for later study, just as were pieces, when detachable, of the unusual specimens with likely horticultural potentialities. Bundles of dried specimens or packages of accumulated plants were expressed to Philadelphia each week or so.
Quest of this early azalea led south as far as Putnam and Alachua Counties in the general vicinity of Gainesville, Florida, but apparently no farther. Just south of here the high dryness of Ocala National Forest was explored with considerable thoroughness but without return, other than in a still vivid experience of driving the truck down a steep sandy and rutted road to a crossing of the Oklawaho River, only to find that the bridge had been washed out in a previous storm. The only negotiable return lay by slow stages through undisturbed woodland with both darkness and the bottom of the gasoline tank staging a neck and neck approach. Ultimately a logging trail was discovered and the rest was of chief significance in teaching a lesson in preparedness which stood us in good stead on several later occasions.
At Gainesville I took the opportunity to check native azaleas in the herbarium of the University of Florida and also to spend several instructive hours with Dr. H. H. Hume in search of azaleas and hollies of the area before again following R. canescens northwest. Apparently skipping the coastal counties of Lafayette, Taylor, etc; it reappeared in fine quantity on the banks of the Suwannee River near White Springs, where on a warn day it was being worked by honey bees, bumble bees and butterflies. It reappeared very conspicuously with dogwood on crossing the Fall Line in Madison County and it became evident that southward occurrences in this region are only, in fact, in very localized pockets, often widely separated. Still travelling west, this azalea reached perhaps a peak in quantity on the banks of the Yellow River in Okaloosa County where bushes became small trees of 15 ft. or more with heavy, branching trunks. It reached a second peak across the Sabine River in east Texas where the flowers seemed somewhat larger, their tubes longer and the leaves less hairy than in Florida and Georgia. Pure white forms and deep purple-red ones, those with large flowers and small ones with yellow blotches or with delightful scent — all were found during the next six weeks which eventually revealed a distribution of this species from the South Carolina coast around the Gulf to the Trinity River in Texas and north across Arkansas and Mississippi to southern Tennessee and southern North Carolina. It clearly covers an enormous area whose only major gaps are the neutral soils of the Mississippi Valley, the Red Hills of Mississippi and Alabama and a few regions not generally suited to ericaceous plants.
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