Daily News-Record, May 5, 2023
Mountain laurel is common in the mountains of Virginia. In May, a plant that is situated in a sunny to partly sunny area will be covered with large and beautiful flower clusters. Thus, it’s not surprising that folks often use mountain laurel as a landscape plant. It can reach 20 feet in height and look like a small tree, but it’s more often a many-stemmed shrub between four and ten feet tall.
Mountain laurel is useful to wildlife. Ruffed grouse and wild turkey sometimes nest in mountain laurel thickets. Some insects are lured to the flowers for nectar, and songbirds, reptiles, amphibians, and small mammals may use the shrub’s evergreen foliage for cover.
Songbirds can penetrate the foliage to hide from predators, such as Sharp-shinned Hawks that are common in Virginia during the winter months. Small mammals, such as short-tailed shrews, often make entrances to their subterranean tunnels in the shadow of mountain laurel so the openings are not so blatantly obvious to predators.
However, I once watched an American crow patiently observe a hole in the woods by my driveway for several minutes. It did, indeed, catch an unwary shrew as it poked its head out to survey the surroundings.
Reptiles (scaly, cold-blooded animals) and amphibians (cold-blooded animals that spend part of their lives in water) also make use of evergreens. Lizards, turtles, snakes and salamanders can’t regulate the internal temperature of their bodies. When they’re in need of warmth, they must lie in the sun to absorb heat from its rays. When they need to cool off, they need to seek the shade of plants.
And sometimes they just need privacy. I once found a pair of Box Turtles mating underneath low branches of mountain laurel. They obviously did not want to be seen by a predator while busily procreating!
The large pinkish-white flower clusters attract insects, such as bees. mountain laurel has an interesting mechanism to ensure pollination by these animals.
The pollen-bearing stamens (the male part of a flower) are tucked into pockets at the base of the petals. When an insect lands on a blossom, at least one stamen (or more) will spring out of its pocket and slap the insect!
Pollen is thus deposited on it, and the insect then carries it to other blooms where the pollen might rub off onto the female part (the pistil) of the flowers. Voila! Fertilization occurs, resulting in seeds.
Each cup-shaped bloom is less than an inch wide and imprinted with faint dots. Colonists gave mountain laurel the common name of “calico-bush”, likening the flowers to polka-dotted calico; a fabric that is heavier than muslin — a course-textured cotton.
Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) grows naturally in acidic soils, requiring the same growing conditions in your yard as rhododendron and azalea bushes.
Note: All parts of mountain laurel are poisonous to people and livestock. You might want to avoid planting it if you have young children, or you raise bees for honey, which could end up as poisonous, too.
Marlene A. Condon is the author/photographer of The Nature-friendly Garden: Creating a Backyard Haven for Plants, Wildlife, and People; Stackpole Books. She writes a blog at InDefenseofNature.blogspot.com.