792 TREES OF NORTH AMERICA 



a pyramidal head, and erect branchlets light red-brown and pilose when they first appear, 

 bright orange-brown, lustrous, and nearly glabrous during their first winter, and rough- 

 ened by slightly raised oblong-obovate leaf-scars with conspicuous central fibro-vascular 

 bundle-scars, becoming light brown slightly tinged with red during their second season and 

 dark gray-brown the following year; or more frequently shrubby. Winter-buds: terminal 

 broad-ovoid, acute, about f ' long, with much thickened bright chestnut-brown shining 

 scales conspicuously white-pubescent near the margins toward the apex; lateral buds 

 smaller, ovoid, compressed, rounded or short-pointed at apex. Bark thin, smooth, pale 

 gray. 



Distribution. Sandy woods in a few isolated stations in the valley of the Savannah 

 River, near Augusta, Richmond County, and in Burke and Bullock Counties, Georgia. 



2. RHODODENDRON L. 



Trees or shrubs, with scaly bark, terete branchlets, terminal buds formed in summer, and 

 fibrous roots. Leaves usually clustered at the end of the branches, revolute and entire on 

 the margin, persistent or deciduous. Flowers in terminal umbellate corymbs from buds 

 with numerous caducous scales; calyx 5-parted or toothed, persistent under the fruit, 

 corolla 5-10-lobed, deciduous; stamens 5 or 10, rarely more, more or less unequal, ulti- 

 mately spreading; filaments subulate-filiform, pilose at the base; disk thick and fleshy, 

 crenately lobed; ovary 5-10-celled; style slender, crowned with a capitate stigma and per- 

 sistent on the fruit; ovules numerous in each cell, attached in many series to an axile 2- 

 lipped placenta projected from the inner angle of the cell, anatropous. Fruit a woody 

 many-seeded capsule. Seed scobiform; seed-coat loose, reticulate, produced at the ends 

 beyond the nucleus into a short often laciniate appendage; embryo minute, cylindric, axile 

 in fleshy albumen; cotyledons oblong, shorter than the radicle turned toward the hilum. 



Rhododendron with some four or five hundred species occurs in eastern Thibet, on the 

 Himalayas, in southwestern China, the Malay peninsula and Archipelago, New Guinea, 

 northern China and Corea, Japan, the mountains of central Europe, on the Caucasus, 

 and in eastern and western North America, the largest number of species being found in 

 southwestern China and on the Himalayas. Of the twenty-three or twenty-four North 

 American species one only is arborescent. 



Rhododendron possesses astringent narcotic properties. It produces hard close-grained 

 compact wood sometimes used in turnery and for fuel. Many of the species are cultivated 

 in gardens for the beauty of their large and conspicuous flowers. 



The generic name is from pbdov and dtvdpov, the Rose-tree. 



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



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

 pointed at apex, and narrowed, cuneate or rounded at base, when they unfold covered 

 with a thick pale or ferrugineous tomentum of gland-tipped hairs, and at maturity gla- 

 brous, thick and coriaceous, dark green and lustrous on the upper surface, usually pale or 

 whitish on the lower surface, 4 '-12' long and 1|'-2|'' wide, with a broad pale midrib and 

 obscure reticulate veinlets; persistent for two or three years; petioles stout, ridged above, 

 rounded below, I'-ll' in length. Flowers: inflorescence-buds surrounded at first by sev- 

 eral loose narrow leaf-like scales, and when fully grown in September cone-shaped, 1|' 

 long and \' broad, w r ith many imbricated ovate scales rounded and contracted at apex into 

 a long slender point, opening 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 cov- 

 ered with glandular white hairs and furnished at base with two linear scarious bractlets, 

 from the axils of the scales of the inner ranks of the inflorescence-bud, 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 a long slender point; calyx light green and puber- 

 ulous, with rounded remote lobes; corolla prominently 5-angled or ridged in the bud, cam- 



