This section is from the book "An Illustrated Flora Of The Northern United States, Canada And The British Possessions Vol2", by Nathaniel Lord Britton, Addison Brown. Also available from Amazon: An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. 3 Volume Set..
pl. 36. 1806.
Low branching more or less glandular shrubs, with small crowded linear obtuse coriaceous evergreen leaves. Flowers long-pedicelled, nodding, mostly pink, blue or purple, in terminal umbels. Pedicels bracted at the base. Calyx 5-parted, persistent. Corolla ovoid or urceolate, contracted at the throat, 5-toothed. Stamens 10, included; filaments filiform; anthers attached to the filaments by their backs, oblong, obtuse, awnless, the sacs dehiscent by terminal oblique chinks. Disk obscurely lobed. Ovary 5-celled; ovules numerous; style filiform, included; stigma obscurely 5-lobed, or capitate. Capsule subglobose or globose-oblong, septicidally 5-valved to about the middle. Seeds minute, the testa coriaceous. [Greek, a sea nymph.]
About 8 species, natives of arctic and alpine regions of the northern hemisphere, the following typical. Besides the following, 5 or 6 others occur in northwest America.
Fig. 3233
Andromeda coerulea L. Sp. Pl. 393. 1753. A. taxifolia Pall. Fl. Ross. 1: 54. pl. 72, f. 2. 1784. Phyllodoce coerulea Babingt. Man. Brit. Bot. 194. 1843. Menziesia taxifolia Wood, First Lessons 185. 1856. Bryan thus taxifolius A. Gray, Proc. Am. Acad. 7: 368.
1868.
A shrub 4'-6' high, the branches ascending. Leaves yew-like, 3-5" long, less than 1" wide, articulated with the branches, crowded above, their margins acutish, scabrous or serrulate-ciliolate; pedicels erect, very glandular, s"-8" long in flower, elongating in fruit, solitary or 2-6 at the ends of the branches; corolla 4"-5" long, about 2" in diameter, pink or purple, heath-like; calyx-segments lanceolate, acuminate, glandular; capsule erect, about 2" high.
Summits of the higher mountains of Maine and New Hampshire; Mt. Albert, Quebec; Labrador and through arctic America to Alaska. Also in Greenland and in northern and alpine Europe and Asia. July-Aug.
 
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