Mountain Phlox
Phlox ovata

Mountain phlox blooms in Wildwood mostly in late May and early June.  It is a showy plant with hot pink to purple flowers that peer out from the greenery under the power lines along Wildwood Drive.  Members of the genus Phlox typically have leaves in pairs opposite each other on the stems and blue, pink, or purple flowers with a shape called salverform by botanists.  A salver is a little plate, and salverform flowers are formed by fusion of the petals (5 in Phlox) to form a flat dish shape.  However, the dish shape narrows very abruptly to a long narrow tube at the back of the flower.  Thus, a phlox flower could be described as a five-lobed dish balanced on a thin tube.  You can see the opening into the flower tubes at the center of each flower in the picture. 

The genus Phlox is primarily a North American genus, with a few members in western Asia.  A number of species in this genus are cultivated; Phlox paniculata or garden phlox is the most common.  The genus is in the Polemoniaceae, usually called the Phlox family; however, the family name comes from the genus Polemonium, members of which are commonly known as sky-pilots or Jacob's-ladders.  Polemonium is primarily a western genus and is not known in Wildwood.

Mountain phlox is a plant primarily of the southern Appalachians from Georgia to Pennsylvania, but is also found in scatted localities north to Massachusetts and west to Indiana and Alabama.  It likes open woods.  In Wildwood it is common on the bluffs along Wildwood Drive, and invades the woods above them.

The genus name Phlox comes from the Greek word phlox meaning flame, referring to the color of the flowers of many members of the genus.  Mountain phlox growing amid the other green plants along the bluffs does resemble little flames shining in the shadows.

(Rewritten 6/22/21 to reflect the correction of the identification.  Earlier believed to be Phlox glaberrima.)

GGC