The Rose Tree - Rhododendron and a few azalea cousins

Two Rhododendron specimens, in bud and bloom

The rhododendrons are making a big splash around town this week. Their vibrant blooms contrast beautifully with the continued bright green growth on the trees and shrubs and lawns, boosted by excessive amount of recent rain. I mow my own lawn; waiting five days between cuttings was too long--even my shaded yard is lush with growth this year.

I have several of the magenta/mauve/lavender/pink variety, Rhododendron catawbiense  'Roseum Elegans' and I think the cultivar above is the same, although the tags of these established shrubs are probably long gone. The photos for today's post were taken a few days ago at  friend P's house where I help out a few hours a week. He has some lovely specimens which he takes great pride in, but I tease him when he calls them rhododendrums, which is a common mistake.

This is one bright colored azalea, piercing the gloominess of yet another damp and dreary Michigan day!

Pinkish buds turn almost pure white when in full bloom, a lovely contrast with the 'Roseum Elegans':

This half-open azalea bloom is captured in a stage I have never seen before--truly exquisite:

I don't remember when I first started admiring the rhododendron, but I first planted them here in West Michigan when we moved to this house in the early 90's. They certainly were not common in the hot and dry summers and frigid winters of my youth in South Dakota. They seem to thrive here, although I have lost a few to some hot summers, probably due to insufficient watering. I hope they are in bloom near the lake in South Haven when we travel to a cottage on Lake Michigan for the Memorial Day holiday. Perhaps I can persuade my husband to stop the car a few times and capture some more colors and cultivars which seem to enjoy the sandy lakeside environment.

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More Rose Ramblings

I have been browsing a book I bought last summer, Tales of the Rose Tree (Ravishing Rhododendrons and Their Travels Around the World), by Jane Brown. Brown is a self-described "rhododendronophile," but takes issue with the name, which translates rose tree, from the Greek rhodon (rose) and dendron (tree). It is a delightfully well-written book, but it includes so much detail with respect to the names, places, botanists and royals associated with the development (over a few hundred years) of the hundreds of species and hybrids of rhododendrons and azaleas (which share the same genus), that it is not for the faint of botanical brain.

It was good to learn from Brown's book that the catawbiense which I grow is named after the Catawba Indians of Appalachian country, where it was first found. Most propagated cultivars have been discovered in  China. Rhododendron sinogrande, discovered in 1912 in the mountain borderland of China, Tibet and Burma, has a cult status, according to Brown:

"She . . . ruled her fortress heights above the valley of the Salween and westwards to the Mishmi Hills and beyond, long before her human neighbours and demigods established their forbidden cities. She was, and is, remote and imperially despotic, preferring an altitude of about 10,000 feet and dominating dark forests and impassable jungles with her gnarled and twisted branches. She lives to a great age, grows into a substantial tree; everything about the plant is hugely impressive--its leaves are the largest of all rhododendron, great deeply veined, dark green ovals sometimes two feet long, sagging under their own weight as they hang by thick stalks from an even thicker stem, surrounding great spear-headed buds. She flowers with an imperial insouciance, when she feels like it but not every year; when they come the flowers are pale yellow, translucent globes springing from the ruffs of glossy leaves, lighting the dark woods like the lamps at the feast table.

Sinogrande has an imperial cousinage, the inevitable relatives and pretenders that put something of a strain on the supply of epithets."

 That is a sample of the book at its descriptive best. It is also quite humorous in places, and at worst--endlessly boring with names, dates, species and botanists--and reads in some sections as tediously as a Biblical genealogy: so and so begat so and so . . .