If all you’re seeing is green lately, maybe it’s time to slow down and study more closely the colors and contours of life around you. For folks who are newish to the Pacific Northwest (or to nature in general), this post offers guidelines for identifying plants you’re likely to see regularly. To that end, let’s start at eye level with shrubs.
Pacific Rhododendron
Pacific rhodies are outrageous fashion misfits. In their hot pinks and showy long leaves, they don’t care to acknowledge the prescripted styles of the Pacific Northwest.
Hooded jackets, crosshatch flannels, sandals with socks?… mais non! How about a spray of hot pink instead, with a saucy, delicate blush and a long-leaved, flirtacious flutter? How about an evocation of tropical paradise – sultry beaches, rainbow-popping parrots and macaws, and eternal, juicy pineapples – right in the middle of your dark-cloud backwoods grunge? How about that?
There’s no arguing with a rhody’s flamboyance and there’s nothing to be done, really, except to embrace it, as the rest of us have, as the Washington state flower.
Distinguishing looks:
- Big leaves. The chartreuse leaves stretch long and langorous, as big as bananas, and will make you feel you’re in a tropical rain forest (if the weather weren’t so chilly) with their voluptuous greens.
- Audacious, tropical color. Might I have mentioned the color? Rhodies don’t strive for subtlety, at least in springtime. Much of the year, they blend and mingle, green in a sea of green, stretching their leaves long and their branches high. But in Spring, let the party begin! Fiesta! Forever! If you want to blend into a Pacific Northwestern forest in May, your only hope is to go flamboyant. Camouflage comes in one color, bright pink, and, with enough pink, you will blend into the May-time woods like a leopard on the savannah, or like a prom queen at Carnival.
Norm and Max:
- Fashion trailblazers defy description, and rhodies are no exception. Case in point: is a rhody best known as a shrub or a tree? Well… yes. Rhodies are both; or either; or whatever they feel like being. If they reach wide and low, well, then they’re shrubs, aren’t they? And if they choose to stretch 25 feet from heels to sky, you can’t really argue with them being trees, can you? I think not.
Likes:
- Well-drained soil – not too wet, not too dry please.
- Doesn’t mind scrubby, logged areas or living at the side of the road (they’ll bring the party).
- Living under big, handsome trees like Douglas-firs and Western Hemlocks
- Fiesta! Forever!
Nicknames / AKA:
- State flower of Washington
- Their Latin name is rhododendron macrophyllum, which roughly translates to “rose tree with huge leaves.”
- Pacific Rhody, Coast Rhody, Big Leaf Rhody (I’m telling you! Big leaves!), California Rhody
Not to be confused with:
- Other rhodies
- Green bananas
- Anything edible – these guys are toxic.
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