Rhododendron ‘Weston’s Pink Diamond’

Double Flowered PJM Rhododendron Hybrid
Rhododendron ‘Weston’s Pink Diamond’

I have been cleaning off some of my Compact Flash cards so I can shoot some new pictures. Lately I have been picking the photos I want right off the card with Adobe Bridge®. It is a good program once you get used to it but every once in a while my cards get filled up. Today’s plant is from the Estate’s Rhododendron Collection and this picture was taken April 25th. The plant was purchased at Weston Nurseries in Hopkinton, Mass., about 10 years ago. A lot of the plants in the garden came from Weston Nurseries. I found an interesting page on the Rhododendron breeding program Weston here:
rhododendron.org

Here is an excerpt:

The Weston Hybrids
Dick Brooks
Concord, Massachusetts
Source: JARS V53:No.4:p195:y1999

“The tendency toward petaloid or double flowers, which you will recall showed up in the early PJM Group hybrid 'Laurie', has been exploited more recently to give us a whole series of double-flowered lepidotes. First to be introduced, in celebration of the nursery's sixtieth anniversary in 1983, was 'Weston's Pink Diamond', a cross of PJM Group and Rhododendron mucronulatum 'Cornell Pink'. As might be expected from this pedigree, it forms a tall (over six feet at maturity), upright plant, semi-deciduous with spectacularly brilliant fall color. The flowers, produced in mid-April here in eastern Massachusetts, are rose pink, with the stamens converted to an inner circle of petals. 'Weston's Pink Diamond' was followed by a bevy of double-flowered lepidotes of complex ancestry, involving PJM Group, pink mucronulatum, white dauricum, white minus Carolinianum Group and 'Gable's Pioneer'.”

I am adding from:
rhodyman.net glossary

“lepidote: having minute scales. Tiny scales typically cover the undersides of the leaves. Characteristic used to separate the genus Rhododendron into two major groups: lepidotes and elepidotes.”

The Weston page maybe a little to technical for some people’s enjoyable reading but I found it interesting. Maybe because I met some of the people involved and know the nursery. I will never forget the time I went to buy some plants up there and it happened to be the day the PJMs were in pretty much peak bloom. It was an amazing tapestry of purple. Hard to describe, actually, and I did a miserable job. Trust me it was quite a sight.

Here is a link to a britannica.com
britannica.com article
about Rhododendron.

I have a lot of work to do today and the rest of the week. I’ll probably end up working all weekend. I have been thinking a lot about what I am doing and hope to post a little about my thoughts. I need to find a quiet half and hour though and that is not going to be very likely for a while.



I am not sure what this guy was up to in the garden but I got the sense that it was no good. It looks like something munched on the Columbine leaf in this picture. *rolleyes*