"How to Know the Wildflowers" (1922) by Mrs. William Starr Dana has some fun information about this plant. It can be found in boggy places from Pennsylvania and New Jersey northward and flowers in June. The flowers are usually bright red before they expand. Linnaeus was said to have named this plant Andromeda because he found it "always fixed on some little turfy hillock in the midst of the swamps, as Andromeda herself was chained to a rock in the sea."

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This Bog-Rosemary is a northern species found wild in bogs and swamps in much of Canada, New England, New York, northern New Jersey & Pennsylvania, northeast Ohio, northern Indiana, Michigan, most of Wisconsin, and northeast Minnesota. It has alternate, linear, glossy, leathery leaves that are white felty beneath and the leaf edges are rolled under. It has shallow creeping rootstocks that allow it to form a colony and it is easy to transplant. It is not easy to grow in most gardens, unless one can create a bog garden with constantly moist to draining wet acid organic soil, that would have a sandy loam texture or be potting soil. My biggest customer had one for a few years near her fountain pool where the soil was usually very moist, but I don't think it could thrive in the sort of heavy silt-clay soil, and it died out. Jenkins Arboretum in southeast Pennsylvania, (Zone 6b), just upgraded their bog garden along their large pond and planted one and it should do well there. This plant is compared to Rosemary because it looks similar, but it leaves are poisonous. It is sold by some native plant and specialty plant nurseries.

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