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It’s easy for those of us reared in North Carolina to take azaleas for granted, with their paper-thin petals on sturdy branches, their stout leaves, their mouths open to the world. Some of the first plants to bloom, azaleas enwreathe our homes, schools, and churches. Purple, pink, and white clouds, bonfires of red or orange make passageways to our places, ring our trees. In the Coastal Plain and Piedmont, azaleas largely grow as the prim, wieldy shrubs lauded at Wilmington’s five-day festival held in their honor.

In the west, however, their wilder cousins bloom naturally. Here, rhododendron and flame azaleas need no shoveling spades to grow, nor do they confine themselves to yards and borders. Their neighborhoods come wild.

Mary Jane Epps, associate professor of biology at Mary Baldwin University, spent many months quiet in Appalachian forests, watching the world.

“I started wondering about azalea pollination,” she says.

Many flowers hold their parts close, anthers and pistil hunched together to draw in the fuzz-bottomed bee, the vibrating, frenetic fly, the trundling beetle, the tremulous hummingbird. Not azaleas. They fling their pollen-dusted anthers out in all directions like worn-out party horns, too far apart for bee or beetle to reconcile.

“The more we look at them, the more intriguing little mysteries we find they have to offer,” Epps says.

Beauty upon beauty: Starting in spring, swallowtail butterflies light on azalea bushes across our state, like the ones at Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham. photograph by Charles Harris

Epps planted herself near flame azalea bushes in the Appalachian Mountains to see what might show up to drink their nectar and spread their pollen. She didn’t have to wait long. From the canopy came an eastern tiger swallowtail — all yellows, blacks, and blues. About the size of a human palm, it represents one of our state’s largest butterfly species.

When a butterfly like an eastern tiger swallowtail lands on a flame azalea bush, it flaps its tremendous, gentle wings, brushing those party horns and coating itself in pollen. As the butterfly hunts for nectar, it keeps flapping, transferring pollen from flower to flower. Watching this, Epps realized that flame azaleas rest gape-mouthed because they are calling for large butterflies to come home to them.

When Epps saw who handled azaleas best at her study site, she was floored: “Here is a plant whose flowers are visited by lots of different species, so it would be natural to assume it could be pollinated by all sorts of things.”

Other butterfly species can work flame azalea flowers, too, but large butterflies like the eastern tiger swallowtail seem tailor-made for the job. They begin flying in March, right when azalea blossoms open, and continue into early fall, after azaleas have faded.

Azaleas and butterflies have been meeting this way since before antiquity. It wasn’t until Epps looked at them in the woods, in this decade, that we all saw the ancient connection between the two. Understanding even the most seemingly common occurrences in this life requires wondering and noticing, two abilities that each of us has. We can all find something astonishing in the everyday if we pay attention.

In China, where many of our azalea species originated, the plants are sometimes called the “thinking of home” bush. Those of us who leave North Carolina might notice that azaleas aren’t common outside the Southeast. We have the long summer days. We have the right dirt for it. We also have the massive, soft wings flapping though the air, seeking rest and a little something sweet in the embrace of those wide-open petals. We might not realize what we’re missing when we leave, but we’ll know it when we see it: the soft place to land, the sweetness inside.