Roswell Old Mill park is situated between the Chattahoochee River and Big Creek. The steep hill is still forested and not built-up like the rest of the close-by greater Atlanta. At my visit there were still some R. calendulaceum in bloom and very few natural hybrids between this species and R. canescens that was also growing here but was past bloom. There was also R. minus and Kalmia latifolia, but still in tight bud. In the southern part of the park I encountered two lonely specimens of R. flammeum that could not be differentiated from R. calendulaceum from a distance. They raise the question if and how both species are interconnected. Unfortunately more to the south where a main distribution area of R. flammeum used to be most if not all populations have disappeared because of the ever growing city of Atlanta. I wonder how it might have looked like on all these countless hills 100 or 200 years ago.
