Montana Field Guide

Alpine Bog Laurel is a low, evergreen shrub with branched, ascending to prostrate stems that are generally 2-5 dm long and which root at the nodes. The narrowly elliptic leaves are 2-4 cm long, are opposite, and have short petioles and entire, rolled-under margins. They are dark green and glabrous above but densely gray-hairy and glandular below. Several flowers are borne on stalks that are 2-4 cm long at the stem tips. The calyx has 5 deep lobes that are 2-3 mm long, and the deep pink, bowl-shaped, 5-lobed corolla is 12-18 mm broad. There are 10 stamens. The fruit is a nearly round capsule that is 2-3 mm high; it opens by 5 slits radiating from the center.

Flowering in May.

Our only species of Kalmia. Reports of K. polifolia in the strict sense for Montana are based on larger-statured plants of K. microphylla. The diagnostic characters of club-shaped, purple trichomes along the leaf midribs and seeds >1.5 mm used to distinguish K. polifolia as treated by Ebinger (1974) and in the Flora of North America are not present in Montana material. Leaf size and shrub height which have been used to distinguish between the two species do not appear to be good morphological characters as they are highly variable, influenced by environmental conditions and overlap in the characters between the two species does occur.

Fens, moist to wet, organic soil of spruce forest openings and margins, margins of lakes and ponds from valley bottoms to the subalpine zone.

POLLINATORS
The following animal species have been reported as pollinators of this plant species or its genus where their geographic ranges overlap: Bombus fervidus, Bombus pensylvanicus, and Bombus impatiens (Colla and Dumesh 2010).