National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Mountain Laurel

The Mountain Laurel (Kalmis latifolia L.)


When Connecticut's legislature adopted the mountain laurel as the Nutmeg State's representative flower, it chose one that is a patrician in its history, a blue-blood in its family relationships, and an Adonis or a Venus in its beauty.

In its floral relationships the mountain laurel is identified with the heath family, some of its kinsfolk being the trailing arbutus, the wintergreen, the rhododendron, the white swamp and wild honeysuckles, the flaming azalea, and the Lapland rose bay.

Because it grows in places where the bees and butterflies are not so numerous as they are in the fields, the mountain laurel has taken care that no visitor shall escape without rendering it the service of messenger. When the flower opens its stigma is erect, but the anthers are fastened down with a trigger-like arrangement, one in each of ten little pockets in the flower. The bee that creeps down into the flower for a sip of nectar releases a tiny spring, like a mouse entering a trap. The released anther flies up and dusts its pollen on the hairy body of the insect. Now, if you take this pollen and put it under a good microscope, you will see that each grain is in reality a cluster of four tiny balls resembling oranges. Indeed, in passing it may be observed that each species of plant seems to possess some special whim in the shape of its pollen, with its own peculiar devices of exterior decoration and structural form. The laurel's clusters of tiny balls ride safely on the bee as he flies to the next flower, and as he stoops for a sip of that blossom's honey they are brushed off by the ready pistil and the flower is fertilized.

Since ants can never render it any pollen-bearing service, the mountain laurel has set traps to protect its nectar from their ravages. It mounts its flowers on hairy stems and covers the hairs with a sticky substance, so that if Mr. Ant does not heed the warnings of the bristles that no trespassing will be allowed he promptly finds himself wading through a field of glue that pinions his feet until he dies an ignominious death as a would-be thief.

No friend of the stock-raiser is the mountain laurel. In the springtime, when the cattle-growers in the valleys of the East drive their herds to the grazing farms on the mountains, the laurel is the greenest thing in sight. A winter on dry fodder has made every animal hungry for a change of diet; so that, although the herd is urged on, one nip after another is taken of the laurel bushes along the roadside, until, the first thing the drover knows, two or three members of his herd have an overdose of laurel, with “blind staggers” as a result. Usually a day or two brings the affected cattle around, and once on the range, they seldom or never touch the laurel. Only when there is nothing else green in reach will they leave the straight and narrow way of abstinence to indulge in “sheep kill,” as it is sometimes called.

There are many plants that are poisonous, a quality developed as a weapon of defense. And what would we do without our plant poisons? Opium, which in spite of its abuses is a boon to humanity, is merely the self-defense of the poppy turned to the service of man. The laurel, too, belongs to the class of poison-producers. If let alone it drapes the mountainside with lacy bloom, and never hurts any creature that treats it with respect; but woe betide the one that dares to eat it.

The mountain laurel is distinctly an Eastern plant. It flourishes from New Brunswick to the Gulf of Mexico, but, unlike so many flowers that have kept pace with man as he has followed the star of empire westward, it has never crossed the Mississippi Valley. Once there came to the United States a Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm. After making the acquaintance of our American flowers, he decided that the laurel was his preference. He gathered some young plants, took them to Europe, and introduced them on many a fine estate. He also contributed to the plant its scientific name, “kalmia.”

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 488–489. (Illustration from page 503.)