Sheep laurel belongs to the heath family (Ericaceae), kin to the rhododendrons, blueberries, and pieris, and shares that family's love of cool, sour, peaty ground. The genus name honors Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus who traveled the eastern colonies in the 1740s and sent plants and seed back to Uppsala; Linnaeus returned the compliment by fixing his pupil's name to this handsome American genus. The species epithet angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved, while caroliniana marks the southern form described from the Carolinas, distinguished by leaves softly gray-felted on their undersides.
This low shrub with tiny evergreen leaves grows in moist peaty sand in the southern pine flatwoods from South Carolina to Florida and Alabama. The pink summer flowers may be needed to convince some people that this is indeed a Kalmia. It is a charming little shrub for a moist but well-drained sandy acid soil in the sun or semi shade. Care must be taken to insure it is not overtopped or overwhelmed by competing vegetation.
Mountain laurel is the aristocrat of the American heath family (Ericaceae), a broadleaf evergreen native from southern Maine to the Florida panhandle and west toward Indiana and Louisiana, most at home on the acid, rocky slopes of the Appalachians. Linnaeus named the genus Kalmia for his student Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist who botanized the eastern colonies in the 1740s, and the species epithet latifolia means broad-leaved. To gardeners the shrub answers to a whole drawer of common names: calico bush for the patterned flowers, spoonwood for the wood, and simply mountain laurel across most of the range.
Of all the patterned mountain laurels, 'Bullseye' plays the boldest trick with color. The cinnamon-purple buds are handsome in their own right, and when they open the flowers reveal a broad band of deep purple-maroon ringing a white throat and a clean white edge, the concentric target that gives this selection a name. 'Bullseye' belongs to Kalmia latifolia, the broadleaf evergreen native to the acid slopes of the eastern United States, and represents the golden era of Kalmia breeding led by Dr. Richard Jaynes at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, whose decades of selection gave gardeners the banded, picoteed, and richly budded laurels grown today.
Most mountain laurels are shrubs with presence, upright and woody and faintly aristocratic. 'Croft Carpet' flips the script. This rare, prostrate selection of Kalmia latifolia stays low and spreads into a dense evergreen mat, delivering the understory finish that designers chase in shade gardens: lush, deliberate, and quietly polished. A specimen at the JC Raulston Arboretum measured only about one foot tall while spreading many times as wide.
'Pristine' is a pure white-flowered mountain laurel, a luminous departure from the pink and rose-flushed forms of the wild species. The selection was discovered in Aiken County, South Carolina by the late Mrs. Ernestine Law and introduced to cultivation by Woodlanders, a distinctive regional expression of one of the most iconic broadleaf evergreens of the eastern United States. Where typical Kalmia latifolia opens blush-toned, 'Pristine' unfurls in clean, brilliant white, a serene presence that reads especially bright planted en masse or set against darker evergreens.
'Willowwood' is a Woodlanders introduction selected from a mountain laurel found growing in Aiken County, South Carolina. What sets this laurel apart at first glance is the foliage: narrow, willow-like leaves that lend the shrub a finer, more linear texture than the broad-leaved wild Kalmia latifolia. In bloom, 'Willowwood' carries pink flowers with distinct banding, gathered in the familiar rounded clusters that make mountain laurel such a valued broadleaf evergreen for woodland gardens.
This seemingly unlikely hybrid crosses the familiar mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with the diminutive, far less known sandhill laurel (Kalmia hirsuta) of the Deep South, two species that could hardly look more different. The cross was probably first made by the late, great Alabama nurseryman Tom Dodd, Jr., and further investigated by the Connecticut Kalmia expert Dr. Richard Jaynes, whose lifetime of work did more than anyone's to bring the genus into gardens.
