ERICACE^ 



721 



1. Rhododendron maximum, L. Great Laurel. Rose Bay. 



Leaves revolute in the bud, ovate-lauceolate or obovate-lanceolate, acute or short- 

 poiuted at the apex, narrowed or wedge-shaped or rounded at the narrow base, when 

 they unfold covered with a thick pale or ferrugineous tomentum of gland-tipped 

 hairs, and at maturity glabrous, thick and coriaceous, dark green and lustrous on 

 the upper, usually pale or whitish on the lower surface, 4'-12' long, 1^-2^' wide, 

 with broad pale midribs and obscure reticulate veinlets, persistent two or three 

 years; their petioles stout, ridged above, rounded below, I'-l^' long. Flowers: 

 inflorescence-buds surrounded at first by several loose narrow leaf-like scales, and 

 when fully grown in September cone-shaped, 1^' long and ^' broad, with many 

 imbricated ovate scales rounded and contracted at the apex into long slender points, 

 beginning to open late in June after the shoots of the year from buds in the axils of 

 upper leaves have reached their full length ; flowers on slender pink pedicels covered 

 with glandular white hairs and furnished at the base with two linear scarious bract- 

 lets from the axils of the scales of the inner ranks of the inflorescence-buds, in 

 16-24-flowered umbellate clusters 4'-5' in diameter, with accrescent scarious resinous 

 puberulous bracts, those of the outer ranks becoming 1' long and |' wide, and shorter 

 than the lanceolate bracts of the inner ranks contracted into long slender points; 



calyx light green and puberulous, with rounded remote lobes; corolla prominently 

 5-angled or ridged in the bud, campanulate, gibbous on the posterior side, puberulous 

 in the throat, light rose color, purplish, or white, 1' long, cleft to the middle into 

 oval rounded lobes, with conspicuous central veins, the upper lobe marked on the 

 inner face by a cluster of yellow-green spots, and glandular on the outer surface at 

 the bottom of each sinus, with a conspicuous dark red gland; stamens 8-12, white, 

 inserted on the bright green disk; filaments enlarged and flattened at the base, 

 slightly bent inward above the middle, and bearded with stiff white hairs, the 4 or 5 

 short ones at the back of the flower for more than half their length and the others 

 only near the base; ovary ovate, green, coated with short glandular pale hairs, 

 crowned with a long slender glabrous white declining style club-shaped and inflexed 

 at the apex and terminating in a 5-rayed scarlet stigma. Fruit dark red-brown, 

 ovate, ^' long, glandular-hispid, ripening and shedding its seeds in the autumn, the 

 clusters of open capsules remaining on the branches until the following summer; 



