Consider-the-Lilies Web Gallery
Wild Azalea
These native, flowering shrubs begin to color the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains with cascades of pink and white in early May.
This colony is scattered across the west slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains, above the Shenandoah Valley some seventeen hundred feet below.
In the background we can see a spring thunderstorm sweeping across the Valley from the Appalachians.
Soon these rocky slopes were drenched by heavy rain—and I had to run for cover!
This part of the Blue Ridge is drained by several small streams in the valley below.
Earlier in the month, I had found this same native shrub, which is also known as Pink Azalea, adorning the bank of one of these streams.
These valley beauties were two weeks ahead of those up on the Blue Ridge, perhaps because of the difference in altitude.
The Pink Azalea displays blossoms across a broad spectrum of pinkish hues:
Here down in the valley, one shrub put out almost totally white flowers.
Further upstream, another Pink Azalea lived up to one of its common names by producing blossoms of a definite pink cast.
Up at the the Blue Ridge site we found a dark, almost red, Pink Azalea.
The mountain woods were more open than the denser lowland forest below in the Valley, so I could often see the several shades together.
Here are the extremes of the blossom color range, in the foreground and the background, as displayed by these clouds of Pink Azaleas sharing that same slope.
The current accepted botanic name for the Pink Azalea, Rhododendron periclymenoides, is interesting, too. The prefix, Rhododendron simply means "red tree." The suffix, periclymenoides, says that the blossoms of this azalea are similar to those of the European Honeysuckle (Lonicera periclymenum).
L. periclymenum isn't found in Virginia but we do have the native Trumpet Honeysuckle (L. sempervirens), which has a similar coloration.
Do you see a resemblance between the blossom of the Honeysuckle vine, left, and the Wild Azalea?
Another interesting—and identity distinctive—attribute of the Pink Azalea is the tendency for the blossoms to linger after dying.
As you can see (right above) the large stamens and pistil are not miniscule compared to blossom tube, which sometimes causes the falling spent blossom to catch on its pistil (arrow).
As a result, the still-colorful blossoms tarry a bit longer, suspended and dangling in the breeze, before finally dropping to the ground.
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