Gregory Bald or The Adventure Hat discovers Azaleas

Whoops.

I was wandering around the internet a while ago and suddenly realized that I haven't posted anything in months and months and months and months, and that my poor little blog that nobody reads has slowly been starving to death.

The fish on the sidebar can't feed themselves.

So.

 

This post is called Gregory Bald or the Adventure Hat Discovers Azaleas

 

But first, you are probably wondering "What is Gregory Bald?"

 

[photo credit: Wikipedia]

It is a bald located in the Great Smoky Mountains on the NC/TN border [between Blount and Swain County]. It has an elevation of almost 5,000 feet, and you will climb 3,000 of those feet when you start from the access point at Cades Cove.

It is categorized as a "grassy bald" which is a grassy mountain top that is easily recognized by its lack of trees, instead colonized by native grasses and scrubby shrubs. This makes it different from the "heath balds" which are characterized by scrubby evergreen rhododendrons and mountain laurels (among others). Balds are beautiful and mysterious, and I highly recommending finding one and hiking it. It remains a bit of a mystery as to how these balds, which often contain rare and relic plants, are ecologically maintained, but it appears that the grazing of the megaherbivores [which went extinct after the last ice age-thanks humans and climate change] were critical to keeping the balds free of trees.

Gregory bald, despite being a gorgeous bald in its own right, is also home to a rather miraculous collection of deciduous azaleas that are referred to by the people who know about them as a natural hybrid swarm.  

 

There are at least 4 native deciduous azaleas located on the bald:

• Rhododendron arborescens [the sweet azalea]: white to blush petals with distinctive red stamens and a strong, pleasant fragrance; often with a yellow spotch 

• R. viscosum: white to pale pink petals with a narrow tube covered in [extremely] sticky glandular trichomes [hairs]

• R. cumberlandense [the Cumberland azalea]: orange petals, lacking fragrance, with a relatively small geographic distribution

• R. calendulaceum [the flame azalea] extreme variation in flower color, ranging from red to yellow, most often a brilliant orange, with large flowers; one of the true gems of the Appalachian Mountains

[photo credits for the native azalea images: American Rhododendron Society]
For more information please visit the East Coast Native Azaleas Page run by the Middle Atlantic Chapter of the American Rhododendron Society

 

 You may be wondering: "What is the adventure hat?"

 

 

Bingo.

 

And probably you are also wondering: "When will Irene buy photo editing software?" [update: fear not, my dedicated blog readers, as of October 2012, I have indeed invested in LightRoom]

 

Anyway.

 

So there is there are lots of different azaleas on this bald, potentially hybridizing and creating an absolutely gorgeous flower show, ranging from whites and pinks, through vibrant oranges, to deep reds.

 

Want to see some of the natural variation?

 

The Mountain Crop Improvement Lab, with help from the American Rhododendron Society, became interested in trying to determine exactly what sorts of hybridization is occurring on this bald. So we hiked the 5.5 miles (straight up) with plant presses and GPS units to collect living specimens to analyze their ploidy (the number of sets of DNA associated with a plant, and a quick and dirty way to detect who is hybridizing with who) and create dried examples of the diversity of the bald to store in herbaria.

 

 

 

Here is some science happening. 

 

 

Variation!

The look of the bald was grassy, punctuated with azaleas.

These next few pictures are some of the many azaleas in bloom on the bald:

 

 

 

 

 

 Long story short: 4 hour hike up, lunch, collecting and pressing for 3 hours, 4 hour hike down.

In retrospect, I should have named this post: Irene (the wimp) vs the long, hard hike to azalea awesomeness that was totally worth it.

Adventure is out there.