An attractive little shrub, usually from one to three feet high, with handsome foliage. The leaves are finely toothed, dark olive-green, leathery and rather glossy, pale on the under side, and the waxy flowers hang gracefully on a stiffly bending flower-stem, which is sticky and hairy and often bright red, with large, scaly, red bracts at the base of the pedicels and smaller bracts halfway up. The flowers are nearly half an inch long, with a yellowish calyx, covered with reddish hairs, and a white corolla, tipped with pink, or all pink; the filaments hairy, with orange anthers. There is often so much bright pinkish-red about the flower-stems and bracts that the effect, with the waxy flowers and dark foliage, is very pretty. This plant often grows in great quantities, thickly covering the floor of the redwood forests. It is called Salál by the Oregon Indians, who value the black, aromatic berries as an important article of food.
There are many kinds of Azalea, of North America and Asia, mostly tall, branching shrubs; leaves alternate, thin, deciduous; flowers large, in terminal clusters, developing from cone-like, scaly buds; calyx small, five-parted; corolla funnel-form, five-lobed or somewhat two-lipped; stamens five, rarely ten, protruding, usually drooping; style long, slender, drooping; capsule more or less oblong.
Western Azalea
Azàlea occidentàlis (Rhododendron)
White
Summer
Cal., Oreg.
One of the most beautiful western shrubs, from two to ten feet high, loosely branching, with splendid clusters of flowers and rich-green leaves, almost smooth, from one to four inches long, with a small, sharp tip and clustered at the ends of the twigs. The corolla is from one and a half to three inches long, slightly irregular, white with a broad stripe of warm-yellow on the upper petal and often all the petals striped with pink. The western woodland streams are bordered with these wonderful blossoms, leaning over the water and filling the air with their delicious fragrance.
Western Azalea—Azalea occidentalis.
Salal—G. Shallon.
Western Wintergreen—Gaultheria ovatifolia.
There are many kinds of Rhododendron, most abundant in Asia, resembling Azalea, but with evergreen, leathery leaves. The name is from the Greek, meaning "rose-tree."
California Rose Bay
Rhododéndron Califórnicum
Pink
Spring, summer
Northwest