Their shoes slipping through yellow sand, Nancy Bissett and Steve Riefler followed an unpublished graduate thesis like a treasure map.
They snuck through a jumble of scrub oaks and evergreen shrubs. Emerging in a clearing on a bright March morning in the 1990s, they immediately knew they’d found it.
What the thesis had noted as a strange azalea was something altogether different: a sprawling, bushy plant that smelled unmistakably of toothpaste…