Shrubs or low trees with usually alternate, entire leaves and showy flowers in umbel-like clusters from large, scaly-bracted, terminal buds. Fruit a dry 5-celled pod with many seeds.
R. máximum.
Rhododéndron máximum, L. (Great Laurel.) Leaves thick, 4 to 10 in. long, elliptical-oblong or lance-oblong, acute, narrowed toward the base, very smooth, with somewhat revolute margins. Flowers large (1 in.), with an irregular bell-shaped corolla and sticky stems, in large clusters, white or slightly pinkish with yellowish dots. July. Evergreen shrub or tree, 6 to 20 ft. high, throughout the region, especially in damp swamps in the Alleghany Mountains; occasionally cultivated.
Genus 53. CLÈTHRA.
Shrubs or trees with alternate, simple, deciduous, exstipulate, serrate leaves. Flowers (July and August) conspicuous, white, in elongated terminal racemes which are covered with a whitish powder. Fruit 3-celled pods with many seeds, covered by the calyx.
| * Leaves thin, large, 3 to 7 in. long, pale beneath | 1. |
| * Leaves thickish, smaller, green both sides | 2. |
C. acuminàta.
1. Clèthra acuminàta, Michx. (Acuminate-leaved Clethra. Sweet Pepper-bush.) Leaves 3 to 7 in. long, oval to oblong, pointed, thin, abruptly acute at base, finely serrate, on slender petioles, smooth above and glaucous below. Racemes drooping, of sweet-scented flowers, with the bracts longer than the flowers. Filaments and pod hairy. A small tree or shrub, 10 to 20 ft. high, in the Alleghanies, Virginia, and south. Not often in cultivation, but well worthy of it.