Jim Barlup is a well-known hybridizer that is known for crossing rhododendron hybrids from the East Coast with those from the West Coast since these are basically two mutually exclusive groups that don't do as well on the opposite coast.

The plant was registered in 1998 and here is the description:

'Twilight Sun': Elepidote. (['Nancy Evans' x (Whopper* x 'Brandt'slropicana')l x 'Whitney's Pumpkin' *). Hybridized (1987), Grown (1992), Named (1997), and Registered (1998): Jim Barlup, Bellevue, WA. Flowers 17/ball truss, funnel-campanulate, 2" (50mm) long x 2.5" (65mm) wide, with 5 wavyedged lobes; strong red (53B) in bud, opening inside light orange yellow (16C), tinged randomly with deep yellowish pink (41D) on three dorsal lobes; outside (41D) with deep pink (48B) stripes on dorsal lobes; nectaries deep red (53A), 0.25" (6mm) deep. Calyx lobes up to 1.25" (30mm) long, (16C) edged (41 D), with two (53A) spots at base. Truss 5" (125mm) high x 5.5" (140mm) wide. Leaves are held 2 years, elliptic, flat, rounded base, broadly acute apex, 4.25" (105mm) x 2" (50mm), semi-glossy, moderate olive green (147A) above, hairless. Shrub 3.5' (1.1 m) tall x 4' (1.2m) wide in 11 years, intermediate plant habit. Plant hardy to at least 0F (-18°C). Blooms in late April.

Sorry for the gibberish, but the colors are referenced to specific color charts. I don't have any pictures.

Rhodyman - Thanks so much for your interesting and helpful reply!

You know, I was suspecting some resemblance to Nancy Evans (as referenced as part of Twilight Sun's parentage in the info you gave) because of the red buds and buttery yellow blooms. As it happens, I have a Nancy Evans quite close to the Twilight Sun so they will surely work well together.

I'm sure Twilight Sun will do well here because the Pacific Northwest seems to be rhododendron heaven.

You wrote: "Jim Barlup is a well-known hybridizer that is known for crossing rhododendron hybrids from the East Coast with those from the West Coast since these are basically two mutually exclusive groups that don't do as well on the opposite coast."

I don't know much about rhododendrons (even though I have a lot of them!). What are the factors that make the West Coast rhodies and East Coast rhodies mutually exclusive?

By the way, I also see from your info that Jim Barlup lives in Bellevue, Washington. I live in Portland, Oregon so he's almost in the neighborhood. ;-)

I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and now live in Reading, Pennsylvania.

I big difference is that the lawns in Oregon are green in the winter and here they are green in the summer. You have dry summers and we have cold winters when the lawns turn brown.

You have a mild climate with low humidity in the summer and very moist winters but not terribly cold. If you want water in the summer and adjacent months you irrigate. As in the rest of the west, water is a primary concern and summer irrigation is very common. You don't even notice earthquakes unless they cause damage. You get strong east (Chinook) winds and occasional freak weather like the Columbus Day storm of 1962 that left a swath of downed trees through Oregon and into Washington.

We have very hot humid summers and very cold winters. We expect 3" of rain every month. Unfortunately it is often accompanied by violent thunder storms in the summer and even sometimes in the winter. If it doesn't rain for a couple weeks, people yell drought. Only nurserymen irrigate. Most farmers don't even know what irrigation is. People here are terrified if we get an earthquake even though people just read about it, seldom do they ever feel it. We get hurricanes, tornadoes, and other severe storms.

West coast plants are seldom hardy enough for us in the winter and for some reason the flowers don't get as big on the east coast.

East coast plants do well for you, but you don't like them because you have much nicer varieties. Since they are hardy we frequently plant them in full sun and let them fend for themselves in the winter. Not many rhododendrons are grown south of Washington, DC because of the heat. They do well in the Appalachian mountains, but not near the coast. That is azalea country. Also, we need very hardy varieties in New England away from the coast.

Jim Barlup is trying to breed the hardiness of our plants into the your beautiful plants.

Wow! You know way more about my weather than I do! Very, very interesting reply!

In Portland we live in a temperate rainforest--characterized by mild winters, lots of rain but with arid summers:

http://www.scsc.k12.ar.us/2001Outwest/PacificNaturalHistory/Projects/LachowskyR/Default.htm

I'm not real fond of earthquakes. I hate those swelling, rolling things that last awhile. One day we're due for the big one, but such is life. We have sixteen or so bridges spanning the Willamette River, which, as you know, divides Portland in half. A really big quake could take out all the bridges and that would cut us east side peoople off from downtown.

The Oregon coast also has the exact conditions for a tsunami (like the recent one generated by the Indian Ocean earthquake). They now have tsunami preparedness training for Oregon coast dwellers plus evacuation maps.

http://www.oregongeology.com/sub/earthquakes/Coastal/Tsubrochures.htm

But enough of disasters... I'm wondering if my Nancy Evans fades a bit in the site where it is--not full sun but more sun than my other rhododendrons and azaleas get. I've been wondering if I should move it, and now I have son of Nancy in Twilight Sun and maybe that has to go somewhere else too. As if I have another free place for them.

What do you think? Does Nancy Evans just naturally bleach out a bit or is it in too much sun?

I have no experience with Nancy Evans or Twilight Sun. They are way too tender to grow here. I can't find any reference to any special problems with either. Most rhododendrons do fade some, and fade more in more direct sun.

Portland's rain is greatly over rated. Portland gets an annual rain fall of about 36" with more at the airport. Our annual precipitation in the Philadelphia area is 42" including the water content of 21" of snow. The big difference is you get a lot of "Oregon mist" and prolonged drizzles, especially in the Winter. We get brief downpours or thunder storms and then the sun comes out, but very little in the Winter. A rain forest by definition gets over 68 inches of rain each year.

I'm wondering if yellow rhododendrons might have more the tendency to fade in some sun than others. I have other rhodies that don't seem to do that. On the other hand, I haven't grown Nancy Evans in the shade so I don't really know what it does in that case.

Probably the hardest thing to get used to about Portland for newcomers (and maybe also native-borns like me) isn't just the months of ubiquitous drizzle, but it's that during that same period we just have a lot of cool, gray days with no rain but no sun either. People have moved for that reason.

Then again, when the consistently sunny months reappear, we go slightly berserk, as if we were intoxicated by it all. Probably someone has written a book about the psychology of weather. ;-)

I just noticed your link about the top ten Oregon weather events of the last hundred years. So interesting. Of course, previous devastating earthquakes and tsunamis are a bit out of that time frame.

The Vanport Flood: I'm a little too young to remember that personally--it's good to know there's something I'm a little too young to remember. ;-) But I always think about PSU, my alma mater, when I think about that flood:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_State_University

From link: "The University was established as the Vanport Extension Center in 1946 to satisfy the demand for higher education in Portland for returning World War II veterans. (It became known as "the college that wouldn't die" because it refused to close after the Vanport Flood of 1948.) In 1952 the Center moved to downtown Portland and occupied the vacated buildings of Lincoln High School on SW Broadway street. In 1955, the Center changed its name to Portland State College to mark its maturation into a four-year degree-granting institution."

The Tillamook Burn: All those trips to the beach in my childhood and seeing mile after mile of charred trees. It took me a long time not to associate charred trees with the coast.

The Floods of 1996: My son was living at Riverplace by the Willamette and had to evacuate. He piled his belongings up high, made off with the rest of it, and they sandbagged his door. They also made those barriers to prevent flooding of downtown. There are pictures of early Portland, from another flood, where men are going around downtown in rowboats!

Here, there are photos if you click on 1894 flood:

http://www.ohs.org/collections/library/Gallery-Portland-Floods.cfm

The Columbus Day Storm: I missed that one. It was the one year I lived outside of Portland, in Roseburg. Divine Providence for me maybe. ;-) The power lines in Roseburg were really bouncing though.

About the temperate rain forest: The amount of rainfall you describe that would typify a temperate rain forest exceeds what we have in Portland. I sometimes I have read that Portland is in a temperate rain forest:
http://www.destination-hotels.net/portland-oregon.html

From link: "The temperate rain forest climatic conditions present in Portland make it a dream for lovers of green valleys and dense forest areas. The magnificent flower displays littered throughout the "Rose City" are blessed by the temperate rain forest climate conditions. Portland's climate is actually almost Mediterranean-like with its distinct wet and dry seasons. Portland's summer and early fall seasons are marked by sunny skies and dry air. Winters and early spring are just the opposite. The majority of the rain falls during these months of the year; helping to keep the Willamette Valley as green as Ireland."

***

But I don't know anything about this, and I'm not thinking "Destination City Hotels" is an authoritative source of info on the subject. ;-)

They do bring up something though about the Mediterranean resemblance in our climate: we can grow a great number of Mediterranean plants here.

In fact, I've heard that we can grow a wider variety of plants than most other places in the world, anything from magnolias to fir trees. I guess England and Japan are like that too. I've heard something like that somewhere.

... and New Zealand and Ireland. A rhododendron grower in Scotland says that even though they can raise most anything, they get late frosts that kill some of the flowers. Botanists describe the climate from Victoria to San Francisco as Mediterranean with its wet winters and dry summers. I understand that some people in the Napa Valley are taking out vineyards to plant olive trees. Oregon keeps getting more vineyards.

I was a kid living near Union (JFK) & Lombard in north Portland during the Vanport Flood and could ride my bike down to it. I don't remember the college, but lots of low cost houses that were built for shipyard workers during the war were destroyed in the flood.

I worked for the Forest Service based at Government Camp on Mount Hood during summers on a fire crew. We were always expecting the next Tillamook Burn since it had been burning in 6 year cycles ever since 1933. Fortunate for us, the cycles stopped. However in 4 summers we had 28 large fires that our regional crew was dispatched to.

I had moved to Pennsylvania the summer before the Columbus Day storm, but my wife (fiancée then) was in Corvallis and had to walk around downed trees and wires when she went home from the OSU library.

My dad moved from Portland to Pennsylvania after St. Helens blew. He didn't need the aggravation of all the ash. Here it is so hot and humid in the summer you start sweating the minute you walk out your front door. Everyone has AC in their homes and cars.

I joined the American Rhododendron Society when we moved here because they didn't have a selection of rhododendrons in the garden centers. They were labeled as pink, lavender, white and red. We have come a long way since then.

I'm afraid with global warming, Portland keeps getting warmer, like everywhere else. We can grow things here we never were able to grow before. It's common for phormiums and dracaenas to survive and definitely cannas.

It's a bit of an irony that someone with the name of rhodyman moved to where it is hard to grow many of them. But it sounds as if new, hardier varieties are being developed to broaden the rhododendron repertoire there...beyond "pink, lavender, white and red." ;-)

By the way, it was hard for me to stop saying "Union" for that street. When a name is programmed into your brain from nearly infancy, a new one comes hard. But the name is now Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., or MLK.

Working summers on a fire crew? How brave. I've read accounts of firefighting by some smoke jumpers, who parachute into the darned things to fight them. They have these supposedly fireproof tarps or tents or something to hunker down in should the worst happen, that they are trapped. These are designed for one person, but in the account I read, where several people died, some got separated from their protective tarp and were sheltered by others who shared theirs. These firefighters are called "hotshots," and for good reason.

About Mt. St. Helens: Fortunately there was only that one major eruption that drenched us with ash...drenched even though the wind was blowing most of it east, for which we were eternally grateful. Not so good for those east of it, who were downwind of it, but good for us. It has been acting up in the last couple of years, as if it might do something serious, but so far, no big event.

My son and his buddy camped every year up at Camp Cougar near the mountain. Because of the mountain's recent touchy behavior, they have taken to camping elsewhere, like Silver Falls or the Crater Lake area. Do you remember Harry Truman...the Harry Truman from Mt. St. Helens? He was as feisty as the other Harry Truman, the U.S. president. He refused to leave when warned of the pending eruption, but he didn't survive either. Good heavens, I just checked and you can buy the record "The Ballad of Harry Truman" on e-Bay!
http://cgi.ebay.com/Ballad-of-HARRY-TRUMAN-Mount-St-Helens-Washington-RARE_W0QQitemZ160039553439QQcmdZViewItem

A lot of people have air conditioning here although I don't think we need it, and I don't want it. I don't want to be cut off from the warm summer, even when it's over 90, because, darn, it's gray and rains a lot here the rest of year. Also, with air conditioning, your windows are shut and you don't have the sounds of summer floating in through your open windows, bits of overheard conversation as people walk by, the sounds from the ball game at the park a block away. That's part of the allure of summer.

-Bye -

Thanks for the information.