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the next flower. Each taut stamen is a tiny catapult, ready to fly forward and deposit pollen on a bee that visits a flower when it is ready for action. How intricate is timing in nature.
I have spent happy times poking into the pink bowl of laurel bloom with a pine needle; touching the tense stamens at their base sends them flying forward.
Ants are notorious pollen stealers but don’t pollinate and transfer the magic yellow dust to pistils, the female part of a flower. Ants just take the pollen grains to their underground cities for their own uses. Evolution has prepared Kalmia latifolia to prevent ant depradations. Each pink bowl of a flower is supported by a sticky, hairy stalk. Ants don’t make much headway on this slender passage. For them, its like walking through glue.
In “A Natural History of Trees,” Donald Culross Peattie opens his essay on mountain laurel with: “Peach-blow and Redbud, Apple-blossom time and Dogwood season, each in their turn take over the countryside and make it enchanting, but the crown of all the year is the moment when the Mountain Laurel blooms.”
Unless plunged quickly into water, the blooms of mountain laurel quickly droop when clusters are cut. Leave them to grow among rocky juttings on mountain sides or along creeks in the pine woods. There they thrive on the acid soil along with pink ladies slippers, one of our most beautiful native wild orchids.
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