54 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
do not destroy. The spectacle is on a grand scale; 
one can wander over thousands of square miles en- 
compassed by flowers ; — beyond the limits of North 
Carolina these unconsuming flames have spread over 
hundreds of miles of the ridges and spurs of the 
Southern Appalachians, so that one seems to get 
lost even in thinking of it. The people call these 
azaleas "yellow honeysuckles," and get tired of them. 
The azaleas flaming throughout the forest are like 
great music, great poetry, great pictures ; they strike 
too high a note for the lives of the people. Such 
fervor wearies their unaccustomed nerves, and they 
turn for consolation to a calmer expression of the 
great renewal. 
For the flame-colored azaleas, marvelous as they 
are, form but a part of the flood of bloom that rolls 
over the mountains. About the time they appear, 
the fair and restful Kalmia latifolia, or mountain 
laurel, begins to open. The mountains here are green 
with kalmia — or laurel, as one prefers to call it — 
as the hills of the North are green with grass. When 
the forest is burned over, the mountain laurel rushes 
in and competes with young pine trees for the soil. 
It grows in impenetrable jungles in the ravines and 
along the water-courses. Where grown in the open 
and safe from fire, it attains great size, there being 
laurel trees about Highlands and elsewhere as large 
as ordinary apple trees. Generally, however, it 
appears as bushes from three to fifteen feet high that, 
annually covering themselves with bloom, light up 
the mountains from end to end. Standing waist- 
