THE DISTEIBUTIO^ OF EHODODENDKON CATAW- 

 BIEXSE, WITH EEMAEKS ON A NEW FOEM. 



By W. C. Coker 

 Plates 19, 20, 21 and 22. 



Ehododendron catawhiense was discovered bv John Eraser, the 

 indefatigable English explorer, on the top of Eoan Mountain in 1799. 

 Sent to England by him it was there greatly admired and soon 

 established itself as one of the most popular of cultivated plants. It 

 has been much hybridized by skillful breeders and its blood is now 

 to be distinguished in many of the splendid hybrid Ehododendrons 

 so extensively used today. 



The actual distribution of the species and its forms is one of the 

 most remarkable and puzzling of which we have record, and not less 

 remarkable is the ignorance among botanists of the extent of this 

 distribution. The manuals covering this territory confine the species 

 to the mountains. Gray's Manual, Seventh Edition, says "High Alle- 

 ghanies, Va., to Ga;" Small's Flora of the Southeastern United 

 States says "On mountain slopes Virginia to West Virginia, Georgia 

 and Alabama." Dr. M. A. Curtis in his Catalogue of North Carolina 

 Woody Plants makes the inexplicable mistake of considering the 

 Orange County plant as E. viaximum, although it existed in quantity 

 on the hills directly across the river from his home at Hillsboro. He 

 says of R. maximum that it grows as "far east as Orange," while of 

 R. catawhiense he says, "It is often confounded with the preceding 

 \^R. maximum], but besides its different locality, growing only on 

 the tops of such mountains as the Eoan in Yancey and Negro Moun- 

 tain in Ashe, it blossoms earlier than the other, though at a higher 

 elevation, has larger and more intensely colored flowers, and shorter 

 and broader leaves." 



The only published records that I have been able to find of the 

 occurrence of R. catawhiense elsewhere in North Carolina than on 

 the tops of the high mountains are by Dr. Asa Gray, Prof. F. W. 

 Simmons, and by Dr. John K. Small. Dr. Gray was sent spec- 

 imens in flower by Prof. Simmons from Chapel Hill and in 



