Azalea & Rhododendron

The great spring set-piece of the Southern garden. Azaleas and rhododendrons cover themselves in bloom so completely that for a few weeks the shrub disappears behind the flowers, then settle back into quiet, useful evergreen and deciduous shapes.

22 plants in this collection

1979 Catalogue View

About the Azalea & Rhododendron Collection

Azaleas and rhododendrons are two branches of a single great genus, woody shrubs of acid, woodland soils grown above all for their spring flowers. Between them they run from low, twiggy, deciduous azaleas, many of them fragrant native species, to bold evergreen rhododendrons with large leaves and trusses of bloom. What unites them is the flower: massed, vivid, and, at peak, almost total.

In the landscape they are woodland-edge plants, happiest in the dappled light and cool, humus-rich soil beneath high trees. Grown in drifts they turn a shaded slope or border into a wall of spring color; grown singly they punctuate a bed and, in the evergreen kinds, hold structure and leaf year-round. Their season is short and spectacular, so they are best sited among plants that carry interest before and after the bloom.

We grow azaleas and rhododendrons because they are central to the character of the Southern garden, and because the native azaleas in particular are treasures: fragrant, graceful, and deeply valuable to wildlife. Their flowers feed early pollinators, including the butterflies and native bees that emerge with the spring, and the shrubs themselves shelter the small life of the woodland edge.

Give them acid, moist, well-drained soil, part shade, and a mulch of leaf litter, and never let them dry out or bake in full sun. Plant them with our Camellias for a classic acid-soil, four-season planting, underplant with our Ferns, and find the native kinds among our Southeastern Natives.