Mountain Laurel

Mountain Laurel
Kalmia latifolia

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Mountain Laurel lives in the mountains from Maine to Georgia, much to our blessings.There's nothing like finding a sunny slope covered in a veritable glacier of laurel in bloom! The Laurels (Kalmia sp.) along with Rhododendrons, belong to the Heath (Ericaceae) family, and are evergreen. They bloom about the same time as the Rhododendrons, perhaps preceeding them by a week or so, from late May into late June, but usually around mid-June. Like the Rhododendrons, they can be found from low to high elevations, in creek coves, on shady slopes, and on up to sunny rocky locations, but they seem to do best higher up in sunny, drier spots. The flowers are fascinating, beginning as small, tightly-closed 5-sided buds with 5 ridges and 10 little spurs in a ring around its base. They open into 5-sided delicately-shaded pink blossoms with a ring of crimson at the center. Each flower has one pistil and 10 stamens - the stamens emerge from the center, and the other ends are anchored into the petals at the 10 pink spots that form a ring around the farther edges. This "anchoring" causes the stamens to form little springs, and as the flower matures, the ends of the stamens are suddenly released from the petals , literally catapaulting their pollen into the air. There is one other laurel species you might see in our area, though I haven't - Kalmia angustifolia, or Sheep laurel. It is a smaller plant, the blooms grow less clustered, are usually much pinker,and the leaves grow mostly in whorls of three as opposed to the alternate leaves of Mountain Laurel.

A note on the nomenclature (naming conventions) on this site: Scientific names and classifications are constantly being argued and changed, and it drives me nuts. Although I use many different sources for knowledge, for naming consistency I use the "Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas" by Radford, Ahles and Bell, 1968 edition. This book is a well-established authority for the plants of our region and I've been using it for years. If for some reason I must use a different source for a particular plant, I will make note of it within the descriptive text. Don't like it? Tough!

fdudley@weaversites.com

Fiona Dudley
Weaversites
986 Reems Creek Road
Weaverville NC 28787

828-231-1501