What I shall remember longest about the flora of Highlands--and there is no part of eastern North America that is botanically richer, I suppose--is the azaleas. When I drove up from Walhalla, on the 6th of May, the woods were bright, mile after mile, with the common pink species (_A. nudiflora_); and at Highlands, in some of the dooryards, I found in full bloom a much lovelier kind,--also pink, and also leafless,--_A. Vaseyi_, as it turned out: a rare and lately discovered plant, of which the village people are justly proud. I could not visit its wild habitat without a guide, they told me. Within a week or so after my arrival the real glory of the spring was upon us: the woods were lighted up everywhere with the flame-colored azalea; and before it was gone,--while it was still at its height, indeed,--the familiar sweet-scented white azalea (_A. viscosa_), the “swamp pink” of my boyhood, came forward to keep it company and lend it contrast. By that time I had seen all the rhododendrons and azaleas mentioned in Chapman’s Flora, including _A. arborescens_, a tardy bloomer, which a botanical collector, with whom I was favored to spend a day on the road, pointed out to me in the bud. The splendor of _A. calendulacea_, as displayed here, is never to be forgotten; nor is it to be in the least imagined by those who have seen a few stunted specimens of the plant in northern gardens. The color ranges from light straw-color to the brightest and deepest orange, and the bushes, thousands on thousands, no two of them alike, stand, not in rows or clusters, but broadly spaced, each by itself, throughout the hillside woods. They were never out of sight, and I never could have enough of them. Wherever I went, I was always stopping short before one bush and another; admiring this one for the brilliancy or delicacy of its floral tints, and that one for its bold and pleasing habit. For as the plants do not grow in close ranks, so they do not put forth their flowers in a mass. They know a trick better than that. Thousands of shrubs, but every one in its own place, to be separately looked at; and on every shrub a few sprays of bloom, each well apart from all the others; one twig bearing nothing but leaves, another full of blossoms; a short branch here, a longer one there; and again, a smooth straight stem shooting far aloft, holding at the tip a bunch of leaves and flowers; everything free, unstudied, and most irregularly graceful, as if the bushes had each an individuality as well as a tint of its own. Often it was not a bush that I stood still to take my fill of, but a single branch,--as beautiful, I thought, as if it had been the only one in the world.