Rhododendrons: Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum)

This is the third in a series of posts in which we will take a look at some of our native North American Rhododendrons.  Rhododendrons (and their happy sub-genus, Azaleas) occur throughout the continent except on the Great Plains, the eastern interior plains (southern Michigan, western Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.), and all of Mexico other than the mountains of northern Baja California.


"The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life."  -Katsumoto, from the Last Samurai.

Azaleas are a subgroup of the Rhododendron genus; they tend to be a bit smaller than their more robust looking cousins, and while they can put on quite the show in flowers, even in nice big bunches of flowers just like their bigger friends, they do not have flower clusters like the full Rhododendrons do.  They also tend to have a different general leaf shape than the familiar long and cold-curling Rhodies.  In North America, the Azaleas can be found everywhere from the usual mountain haunts to well into warmer, lower reaches near the coasts.  Unlike the Rhodies, most of which here tend to be evergreen, Azaleas in North America tend to be on the deciduous side.  We have 16 native species in North America, many of which can be found in the Appalachians.

One such species is the marvelous Flame Azalea (Rhododendron Calendulaceum), which has beautiful flowers that pull off some sort of heavenly combination of orange, red, and yellow.  Orange seems to be the most prevalent color in the wild population, but cultivators have managed to squeeze out brilliant selections from the neighboring colors of the rainbow to the degree that the Flames probably have as many garden children out there as most other Azaleas or Rhodies, even giving the Catawba descendants a run for their plant money.  While searching for wild type Flames at various nurseries, I have seen far more for sale than any other North American Rhododendrons or Azaleas.  And why not?  They are an incredibly beautiful flower that brings a real show of fiery color the garden.

All of these pictures of are of the same plant at milepost 361.2 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Glassmine Falls overlook.

Naturally, I just had to find one growing wild.  To be honest, I really had no idea they even existed until I was researching the genus two years ago, and ever since then I have been consumed with trying to find some wild Flames.  I knew I could easily find Catawbas and Rosebays, as their locations and bloom peaks are well documented, but for some reason the same has not been my experience of trying to find Flames.  So it was that when I took my recent botanical pilgrimage to the center of Rhodo heaven, well, even the majesty of Roan could not give pause to the hunt.  It turns out I was largely barking up the wrong tree.

The Flames are sort of in between the needs of the Catawbas and the Rosebays when it comes to elevation and exposure.  Like the Rosebays, they seem to thrive best under some amount of shade, yet they are also more than happy with a few hours of direct sunlight.  As such, they can be found on balds, especially the ultimate place to find them, Gregory Bald (which I did not find out about until I was leaving the Smokies), but they can also be found along slightly open areas in the forest understory.  I found a decent number along the Blue Ridge Parkway growing like this, mainly between Mt. Mitchell and Asheville, but like the Catawbas at Craggy Gardens, they were pretty much mostly done blooming by the third week of June at such altitudes higher than 4,000 feet but less than 5,500 feet.  In some places, they formed a decent patch of orange, but impatient motorists made stopping a pretty nasty prospect.  If you manage to hit the right flowering time for certain altitudes (they apparently can handle much lower elevations) it is likely that you will see a bunch more orange.  I was fortunate enough to find one growing half in the sun and half in the shade at the Glassmine Falls overlook.

For this reason I don't have many pictures of them, but the one I did find was a pretty nice specimen.

It was all alone, surrounded by a bunch of American Mountain Ash (Sorbus Americana), a pair of species that looked really nice and lush together.  As you can see, it (and the others I could not stop for) tends to be a bit more fragile looking than the Rhododendrons.  Flames are pretty delicate looking, but they still have nice globes of flowers (even if they only produce one flower per stem) and decent, somewhat glossy leaves.  I would still go so far as to call Flames such as this one a small tree rather than a shrub, because it was pushing twenty feet.  Among the Ash trees, it looked to be as much a part as the canopy as they did.  Elsewhere, especially among the maples and beech, they tended to function more like a second canopy just as the Rosebays do.  I hope to some day make it to Gregory or a similar bald to see them in their open habitat.

Just as Catawbas are a good sign, even an indicator, if you will, that one is close to if not decidedly in the Southern Appalachians, Flames for the southbound mountaineer are a mark that one has progressed at least as far south as the Central Appalachians.  They can be found infrequently in Ohio, and have been reported up in New York, although Pennsylvania claims they have been extirpated.  Like another showy plant that pops up in Ohio, the Crossvine (Bignonia Capreolata), the Flames look like they belong at the edge of the subtropical world.  I suspect that like the Rosebay, they might have once been a bit more common in the northern reaches, and probably got too much attention as a thing of beauty and thus been forcibly transformed into a hopeful garden dream, but their particular forest associations and preferences of habit leave me thinking they are not as northern in nature as their big leaf cousins.