January 2019 in the garden - lepidote Rhododendrons

Just squeaking in here - Douglas Justice's January 2019 in the Garden | UBC Botanical Garden blog article has been up for a month, but I've been away. The blog itself has a lot of very good photos, and if you are reading this today when I'm posting it, you can get a link to the Garden Explorer's compilation of all the stored photos for the plants that Douglas talks about. If that's no longer available to select from the dropdown in Garden Explorer, you can back up, then open Garden Explorer in a new tab (this all works on a PC) so you still have the names of what to enter as queries in Garden Explorer. There are a lot of photos of the lepidote scales - very interesting.

I was pretty unimpressed with my photos by comparison. Here are a few. Rhododenron calostrotum subsp. riparium has new leaves that look like little flowers, an impression enhanced by the light leaf undersides.


Rhododendron augustinii really did get the promised positive response when we stroked the leaves.


This is Rhododendron glaucophyllum, which delivered on the aroma as well as the leaf colour and the bark.