The Azaleas 



i.e. Pentecost or Whitsunday. But as a matter of fact 

 it is usually in bloom well before that festival. 



The third of these American shrubs is the Swamp 

 Pink, or true Swamp Honeysuckle, R. mscosum 

 "mscosum" because the calyx of its flower is glandular 

 and sticky. Its flowers are usually white and deliciously 

 fragrant. They are later in appearing than the two 

 previously mentioned species, and as a consequence 

 the leaves are generally full grown when flowering 

 commences. 



These shrubs appear to have been brought into 

 England first by Peter Collinson, the importer of so 

 many American shrubs, about 1734; but they made 

 no headway in our English gardens, and half a 

 century later, when the collection of shrubs of a well- 

 known gardener, Mr. Bewick, was sold, specimens of 

 the Pinxter Flower, Azalea, fetched as much as twenty 

 guineas. 



In the last decade of the eighteenth century another 

 Azalea was introduced into Great Britain, but this time 

 it came from the East, and not from the West, and it 

 carried clusters of rich yellow flowers. It was found 

 growing on the eastern side of the Black Sea, and one 

 observer describes how he found thousands of these 

 shrubs in full bloom in a marsh , that every spring-tide 

 was overflown by the sea. The natives knew it as 

 the " stupefying shrub," because animals browsing on 



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