Rainbows in the Lehigh Valley Gorge

[TMo]

Mountain Laurel is the state flower of Pennsylvania.  

Between that and Rhododendron, a majority of the Appalachians between Pike County in the east all the way to the southwest corner near Charlie's place is covered in an understory of this shrub.  It grows slowly, attaining a height of about 6-8 feet and the multi-stemmed trunks are thick, dense and gnarly with mid- to dark green leaves that give way in May or June to sticky white flowers.  Deer love to hide in the stuff, and it makes hunting a bit of an adventure, since you can't go in a straight line in any direction - you're constantly weaving your way between the plants while trying not to get lashed in the face by the ends of the branches.

I've been looking for a good method to model the sturdy shrub for the foreground of Mud Run, and I've settled on the flower support of the gray dogwood (also known as the northern swamp dogwood How to Grow and Care for Gray Dogwood (thespruce.com)).  I have a number of these on my property - it's not a great tree for much of anything.  The birds love when the white flower heads turn into white berries.  They eat the berries and poop them out to plant a new tree.  In the process they also get a bunch of berries to fall right around the trunk and you get a ton of sprouting volunteers that are a pain in the neck to beat back to the ground.  However, after the berries fall, you're left with a perfect little tree-ish thing on the end of the new growth that you can just snap off.  It's really good for something like a small spreading (pruned) apple tree once you put some leaves on it. 
       


For the mountain laurel, I decided to push the "trunk" right down to ground level so the spreading trunks just seem to come out of the ground.  I hope to make a bunch of this stuff and clump it all together on the slope between the river and the track.   This could also work to model small spreading pines that you see in the mountains at high elevations.  With all of the green stuff in the photo below, it's probably tough to descriminate between what's mountain laurel and what's not (the mountain laurel is spread out between the big boulders on the left and the rocks in the middle of the photo).  

   

(Looks much better in person - the camera really flattens out the greenery here).  I took one from the side and it still doesn't capture the "3D" effect.