April,
My grandmother's Flame Azaleas were in full bloom last week by the time I got there this week end they were almost done she has four different kinds, one which is a really pretty yellow and almost 10 years old. Tell me how to harvest the seeds and I will get some from her to swap. I've never seen the one like her yellow one....
Martha
West TN

She said she saw them for sale at home depot for a really resonable price like 5$

Marty is the expert on how to harvest and start the seeds. I've only ever done cuttings. :-) I'm hoping to learn from her though, if we can ever get up there at the right time to collect them.

The azaleas in the photo are native azaleas and not something that Home Depot or Lowe's usually bothers to carry. Don't know why they don't carry more native plants, especially these. Here is how they looked about 5 years ago or so:

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These are located in a somewhat mountainous area on the Cumberland Plateau, so they will definitely bloom later than those in West Tennessee. Just now sure how much longer it will take for the buds I saw to mature.....They were pretty tiny, just barely showing any recognizable color at all.

Here is a link that might be useful: Scott's Gulf Wildflowers

April, thank you sooooooooo much for posting the link to the wildflowers. One of my favorite pasttimes in the spring is to hike in the woods observing wildflowers. I particularly enjoyed the lady's slippers. I have a 90-year old aunt on Signal Mountain who grows the yellow ones. Maybe one of these days she will share with me. She has been growing wildflowers in a 1/2 acre woodland at the back of her property for more than 30 years.

April,

Thanks for sharing the wildflowers photos. They were really enjoyable! I'd love to go to the place near Nashville that sells native plants. I saw it on Tennessee Crossroads some time recently. Maybe they'd have one of the beautiful orange azaleas.

Katie

Hi April,
Thank you for the link and posting your wonderful pictures!! I really enjoyed looking at them.
Marianne

Hi, Katie. If you mean Nashville Natives, I actually was working there part-time until recently. They are on the far west side of Fairview. If you want to know how to get there, the easiest way for you to get to them from Memphis would be to go down I-40 Eastbound to the I-840 interchange just past Dickson, take 840 South, and then, when 840 ends, go east towards Fairview on Highway 100 and take the first road (Liberty Road) on the right. Nashville Natives is on the right, a mile or two down Liberty Road. They also have a web site, so just Google "Nashville Natives". You should definitely call them first to make sure they are open.

GroWild (also in Fairview area) may also carry some of the Flame Azaleas, but Marty would have to answer that one for us. It would be a very fun roadtrip for you to visit both of these places sometime, and the folks here on the forum may have other suggestions for good nurseries and garden centers to visit in this neck of the woods. I know that there is a really good gardening store next to the Loveless Cafe, but I don't recall its name.

Anyway, Nashville Natives did (and does) have some cool plants, but their flame azaleas were not the same as these. They were a lighter yellowish orange, while the ones in Scott's Gulf, as you can see from the photo, are brilliant orange. I don't know though if the soil chemistry affects the color; it's possible. The flame azaleas at Nashville Natives started blooming two or three weeks ago, but that's probably due to the difference in elevation and climate.

Glad y'all liked the photos. :-) I have a bunch more from another area near McMinnville that I will hopefully get around to putting on the web sometime. These were taken mostly in March and are of the early spring ephemerals....

Gorgeous pics, April. That orchid is Cypripedium acaule, Pink Ladyslipper. The yellow you saw is probably either C. pubescens (Large Yellow Ladyslipper) or C. parviflorum (Small Yellow Ladyslipper). Both might occur there. The pic of buds looks more like Mountain Laurel than an azalea, but I could be wrong. There ought to be lots of Mt. Laurel in that area, too.

GroWild has just about every native azalea species you can think of (alabamense, arborescens, austrinum, calendulaceum, canescens, cumberlandense, flammeum, periclymenoides, serrulatum, vaseyi, viscosum off the top of my head, I may have forgotten a couple) and natural hybrids, too, including the Gregory Bald swarm which offers hot oranges. There's a wide range of color expression in the gene pool of most native azalea species -- it's not due to the soil, just to natural variation, like some people have black hair and some blond.

That good garden center near the Loveless is Moore and Moore West. Pricey but excellent quality and knowledgeable staff. Some plant geeks work there, so they often have unusual stuff, like dwarf conifers.

Marty

Hot Orange you say!!! Hmmmmmmmmmmm..............

Thanks for the info, Marty. :-) You know you bring up an interesting point -- there are lots of mountain laurel in the area also, so it is possible that I photographed the wrong plant. Now I really want to try to get back up there to make sure. The flamers definitely weren't in bloom when I went there though, so I guess I'll have to keep checking back. I do recall that the flamers had really big leaves, larger than normal azaleas such as you'd find in the garden centers. You can kind of see this in the photo I posted -- almost more like rhododendron leaves. Hmmmm.....very interesting.

Thanks again for all the comments, guys. :-)

--April

P.S. Yes, Jeff, brilliant orange!! :-)

Hey guys -- somebody mentioned rooting azalea cuttings. Are they easy? My camellia cuttings are still doing well so far (crossing my fingers!) -- maybe it would be fun to branch out!

April, I suspect your azaleas are R. cumberlandense (Cumberland Azalea), not R. flammeum. Later blooming, darker red-orange, location -- it fits. I'd have to see them in bloom to nail the ID, but it's a distinct possibility.

Native azalea cuttings can be challenging. The easiest species to root is R. austrinum. Many are quite difficult. All are much more difficult than camellias in my experience. Evergreen types are much easier.

Marty

Thanks for the input! I don't have any austrinum, but I do have R. canescens 'Camilla's Blush'. I may try a coupla cuttings off it just for giggles. :-)

Hi, Marty. Thanks for the explanation. I got out my wildflower book yesterday and reached the same conclusion you had -- I had no idea that the Cumberland Azaleas were also orange! Heck, I didn't even know we *had* a Cumberland azalea. Lol. We had just always called ALL of them flame azaleas. :-) Now I know better.

Thanks!

--April

Hi, everyone. Just an update on my search for the Cumberland (flame) azaleas. I went back this time and the Mountain Laurels were in full bloom, but no azaleas. (You were right about the ID on that one, Marty; I had just forgotten what azalea buds look like!) But, boy, the laurels sure were pretty. I'm kicking myself now for not getting a picture of one. Some of them were 15 feet tall and covered with white blooms!

However, with a little searching around, I think I found the right plants this time. They just weren't quite ready yet. :-) Here is a photo:

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And here is another:

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I didn't get a picture this time, but I think I even found the exact plant that was blooming in the photo I posted earlier. It was just a little bit further along the trail. The forest had shifted around a bit in the intervening years since we took the first photo. :-)

My brother assures me they will bloom the first week of June. I had remembered them as blooming in June, but over time I had convinced myself that must not be right, given that most other azaleas bloom so much earlier. So in another two weeks I'm going back. I have flagged these in the meantime, but I will go back and verify that they are indeed the right plants.

So, Marty, when would we need to go back to collect the seed?

By the way, one of the pink ladyslippers was still blooming. Here is a photo of it for your enjoyment, although the light was very dim under the full forest canopy, so it is a bit dark:

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It was tempting to try to collect seed from the ones that had finished blooming, but I know zero about that, so I figured, rather than depleting the supply that will fall to the forest floor and make new orchids, I'd just let the experts handle it. :-)

More soon, I hope.

--April

Well, it's been a while since my last followup. On June 9, we made one more trip to Scott's Gulf to try and locate and photograph the Cumberland Azaleas. Luckily for us, they were indeed blooming.

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The blooms were not as full as they had been in previous years and I noted a lot more color variation, ranging between lighter peachy-yellows to the darker orange I recalled. But I got a few photos. I wonder if the diminishing bloom is related to the fact that the overstory of the forest has re-asserted itself and these azaleas are slowly being shaded out again? We had never seen them blooming prior to the tornado that went through there and cleared things out, so perhaps this is indeed what is happening.

So, as a followup, when should we return to collect seed? And how should that be done? As you will see in the photos at the link below, I have flagged them with bright orange flagging tape so we can easily find them again. :-)

--April

Here is a link that might be useful: Cumberland Azaleas of Scott's Gulf

April, we were on Signal Mountain last Saturday to celebrate my aunt's 90th birthday. She has been into natives and wildflower for over thirty years. I took this photo of her flame azaleas.