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A YELLOW AZALEA
The first westward trip with R. canescens brought my introduction to the yellow Florida Azalea, R. austrinum, on March 26th near Geneva, Alabama, and in enormous quantity a few hours later along a woodland edge just south of the Florida-Alabama border. Apart from flower color, the general characters of this azalea are rather similar to those of R. canescens but it is more glandular. The little glistening red, pin-head glands cover pedicels and often vegetative shoots, as well as flower tubes. The flower may be wholly a clear, golden yellow or, more often, the petals may be yellow and tubes a variable strawberry red, giving one the impression that this red tube belongs more properly with R. canescens and has perhaps been acquired by R. austrinum after flowering at the same time along the same streamsides and producing a proportion of those unmistakably anemic buff-colored hybrids for many years past. As the banks of the Yellow River grow luxuriant R. canescens so elsewhere they are appropriately covered with masses of the yellow “Florida” Azalea which was subsequently found to occupy a sizeable portion of wester n Florida, southeast Mississippi, southern Alabama, and southwest Georgia — about as much territory outside of Florida as in.
Later collections of R. austrinum were made on the return from Texas on a more northerly swing. Spring was advancing and R. canescens was in collecting condition as far east as Georgia's Altamaha River where it occurs in masses of rich pinks almost across from Old Fort Barrington and the former haunts of the long-lost Franklinia.
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