The plant of our illustration is a native of the eastern portion of the United States, where it grows in sandy or rocky woods and is more abundant in mountainous regions. This shrub, which grows to a maximum height of twenty feet, is a superb object early in June, when it is covered with corymbs of rather large pink or pinkish-white flowers and numerous evergreen leaves.
Easily cultivated and highly ornamental, it has been introduced into the greenhouses and gardens of this and European countries.
In spite of the beauty of this plant, it has a bad reputation, for its leaves are narcotic and poisonous to some animals. “Even the intelligent grouse, hard pressed with hunger when deep snow covers much of their chosen food, are sometimes found dead and their crops distended by these leaves.”
We cannot show the characteristics of this plant in any better way than to quote from “Nature’s Garden,” where we find the following passage:
“All the Kalmias resort to a most ingenious device for compelling insect visitors to carry their pollen from blossom to blossom. A newly opened flower has its stigma erected where the incoming bee must leave on its sticky surface the four minute orange-like grains carried from the anther of another flower on the hairy underside of her body. Now, each anther is tucked away in one of the ten little pockets of the saucer-shaped blossom and the elastic filaments are strained upward like a bow. After hovering above the nectary, the bee has only to descend towards it, when her leg, touching against one of the hair-triggers of the spring trap, pop! goes the little anther-gun, discharging pollen from its bores as it flies upward. So delicately is the mechanism adjusted, the slightest jar or rough handling releases the anthers; but, on the other hand, should insects be excluded by a net stretched over the plant, the flowers will fall off and wither without firing off their pollen-charged guns. At least this is true in the great majority of tests. As in the case of hot-house flowers, no fertile seed is set when nets keep away the laurel’s benefactors.”
Many of our readers reside near the home of the Mountain Laurel and can examine the interesting features of this beautiful plant in Nature’s own garden. Those that do this will be well repaid.
Violets stir and arbutus waits,
Claytonia’s rosy bells unfold;
Dandelion through the meadow makes