My monitoring wild Rhododendron tree up the road has begun to bloom, so that meant a trek to the Rhododendron maximum forest in the Long and Ell Pond Preserve region in nearby Hopkinton, Rhode Island, was on the calendar. That trail through the broad-leaved evergreen thickets—the closest we'll come in the region to the Rhododendron-covered Appalachian mountains in the Southeast—is one of my favorite paths, and while the "rose trees," which is the translation from the Greek of the genus name, were not at their peak, there were plenty enough of the exquisite blossoms to periodically take your breath away. For whatever reason, this doesn't look like a banner year for Rhodie blooms—it's certainly a pale shadow of 2016's for-the-record-books display—but even an off-year is at least semi-spectacular and well worth working up a sweat to observe.