250 ARISTOCRATS OF THE GARDEN 



inhabitant of a few of the high valleys of the Blue 

 Ridge Mountains in South Carolina and had been 

 entirely overlooked until some thirty years ago. It 

 is a shrub with slender stems, and of loose, irregular 

 habit, sometimes growing to the height of from fifteen 

 to eighteen feet, although under cultivation it begins 

 to blossom when less than a foot high. It is perfectly 

 hardy and the pure, perfect pink of its flowers is 

 scarcely equalled by that of the flowers of any other 

 plant. There is also a form (album) of this species 

 with white flowers. 



(b) Eastern North America is very poor in species 

 of evergreen Rhododendrons but it can claim to be 

 the richest region in the world for the section Pentan- 

 thera. Of the thirteen species belonging to this group 

 eight are native of the Atlantic seaboard, and one 

 (R. occidentale) of the western slopes of the Cascade 

 and Sierra Nevada mountains of the West, and an- 

 other (R. sonomense), with smaller rose-colored fra- 

 grant flowers, grows on dry slopes of the mountains 

 near San Francisco, but is not in cultivation. Of the 

 other three, one (R. japonicum) is confined to Japan 

 and Korea, another (R. sinense) to eastern and cen- 

 tral China, and the third (R. luteum) to the Caucasus 

 — the region in Asia Minor bordering the Black Sea 

 and known in ancient times as Pontus — and to Galicia 



