South of the small town of Opp, in the very south of Alabama, there are some unpaved forest roads between US 331 and AL 52. Due to gates some of them are impassable, but there are one or two gaps, so you can still get into these woods by car. Along these forest roads azaleas can be found again and again in different places. Apparently R. canescens and R. austrinum mix here, although I probably saw almost only R. canescens in bloom during my visit. Due to a somewhat longer winter, the vegetation was not yet very much advanced. There were only plants with white to pink flowers, which were probably R. canescens. Many plants still had their tightly closed winter buds. Leaves were not yet visible, so it was impossible to judge which plants had glandular hairs and which not. Only in one place there was a white flower with a yellow spot, which could possibly have been a R. austrinum, and in another place the buds of a plant were clearly yellow, so that I could also safely assign this specimen to R. austrinum.
