My dog does the same thing! He can hear me pick up my phone, somehow he knows my intent and scuttles even my sneakiest effort to document his extraordinary cuteness

A story I didn’t know I needed about a rock mistook for a ham and the fate of the foible having been memorialized in a museum, this is the divine purpose of the internet 🥰

Wizardry!

This work has really cool implications for #plantbreeding as well, and we’re simultaneously working on tools to characterize within and among species pigment variation using rapid screening of seedling arrays, with the idea that breeding rhododendron for fall color is a largely untapped market

Lastly, at the highest scale, how might correlated evolution between leaf and flower pigments, or alternatively independent evolution of different organs, relate to the dual role of pigments to mitigate both environmental stress and pollinator attraction under different environmental conditions?

🧪Our team is working on this colorful mystery right now

what pigment systems (eg, carotenoids, anthocyanins) are found in Rhododendron?

how do stress physiology, phenology & carbon economy relate?

how do species and populations vary, and how do pigments in leaves and flowers relate to each other?

This R minus plant also has a semi-evergreen habit but more mysterious, it has White flowers, which is surprising as all get out because other R minus variants I am growing from Hawksbill Mountain NC, Haines Island AL and Sprewell Bluff GA all have weak fall leaf color and Pink flowers! 🌺

R minus is native to the SE US from Appalachia and down South into Georgia and Alabama

My plant was grown from seeds collected at Graveyard Fields North Carolina. It is an unusual variant for this species. It sprouts a lot from the bottom and develops dark, red and purple coloration in the fall

R dauricum is native to Siberia, Mongolia, China, and Japan and is a very early blooming species. There is often snow on the flowers in mid March. These plants were grown from wild collected seed by the Rhododendron species botanic garden, but I don’t know what location these seeds were collected.

R dauricum is semi-evergreen so the lower leaves with the lighter colors will be lost this fall while the green and purple upper leaves are retained through the winter, presumably an adaptation to help the plant jumpstart their bloom which occurs before leaf out in the very early spring

“Lepidotes” is a common name for a group of rhododendrons that have glandular aromatic scales on their leaves, which have a lemony scent

There are hundreds of lepidote species, most in SE and Central Asia, but a few are found in the arctic, the European Alps and mountainous regions of the US