Kalmia latifolia 26/4 Restock the French missionary-naturalist who botanized

the French missionary-naturalist who botanized across nineteenth-century China and lent his name to the dove tree and to Pere David's deer as well

Where a full sweetbay would overwhelm

hung with dangling tubular blooms in coral-pink to deep red

Like the wild species

and ample water

Kalmia latifolia 26/4 Restock the French missionary-naturalist who botanizedMountain 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