A Profusion of Flowers: Dogwood

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There is nothing quite like a flowering tree to fill the garden with a profusion of flowers.  Our native dogwood, Corunus florida, which explodes with flowers each April, remains my favorite.

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Chosen by the Virginia Native Plant Society as their Wildflower of the Year for 2018, flowering dogwood is an easy to grow understory tree which adapts to sun or partial shade.

Native across most of the Eastern half of the United States, from Florida to New Hampshire and west to Texas in zones 5-9, dogwood adapts to many soils and climates.  They prefer neutral to slightly acidic, moist soil and afternoon shade.

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Dogwoods are found growing along the edges of deciduous forests, but are also popular trees for parks and neighborhoods.  Their clouds of white or pink flowers, when in bloom, show up through shady woods or down winding neighborhood streets.  They grow to only about 30′, which makes dogwood a good landscape choice close to one’s home.

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Dogwoods are one of our most wildlife friendly native trees.  They offer nectar to pollinators early in the season, and their canopy supports over 100 species of butterfly and moth larvae in summer.  Many other insects find shelter in their branches, which makes them a prime feeding spot for song birds all summer long.  Birds find shelter and nesting spots in their branches, and in autumn  their plump scarlet fruits ripen; a feast for dozens of species of birds and small mammals.

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The beautiful white ‘petals’ which surround a dogwood’s flowers are actually bracts.  The flowers are small, almost unnoticeable and yellow green, in the center of four bracts.  A cluster of drupes emerges by September, rosy red and beautiful against a dogwood’s scarlet autumn leaves.

Birds distribute dogwood seeds over a wide area, and they grow easily from seed in the garden or the wild.  Young trees grow relatively quickly and are seldom grazed by deer.

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I am always happy to notice a dogwood seedling crop up in our garden and astounded at how quickly they develop.  A seedling dogwood will most likely bloom by its fourth or fifth spring.

Dogwood trees may also be started from cuttings, especially if more trees of a particular form or color are needed.  Their seeds may be gathered and planted outside in a prepared bed in autumn.  They need cold stratification to germinate, and so an outdoor seedbed is a reliable method to grow new trees from gathered seeds.

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There are many dogwood cultivars and trees found with white, pink or red bracts.  There are also several other native and Asian species in the Cornus genus, some with beautiful variegated foliage or colorful stems.

All are relatively pest free and graceful plants.  The Anthracnose virus is a problem for dogwood trees in some areas.  Good hygiene, removing and destroying any affected plant tissue, is important in controlling this fungal disease.  Keeping the tree in good health, especially irrigating during drought, helps to prevent disease problems.

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The last time I counted, we had at least 15 native dogwood trees around our garden, filling it, this month, with billowing clouds of flowers.  It nearly takes my breath away when the sun is shining and we see them against a colorful backdrop of budding trees and clear blue sky.

There is such prolific beauty in April, how can one person take it all in?

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Woodland Gnome 2018

For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge:  Prolific

Sunday Dinner: Curious

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“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds,

the first passion and the last.”

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Samuel Johnson

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“Enjoy every step you take.

If you’re curious, there is always something new

to be discovered in the backdrop

of your daily life.”

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Roy T. Bennett

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“I set out to discover the why of it,

and to transform my pleasure

into knowledge.”

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Charles Baudelaire

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“The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Curiosity has its own reason for existence.

One cannot help but be in awe

when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life,

of the marvelous structure of reality.

It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend

a little of this mystery each day.

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Albert Einstein

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“Study hard what interests you the most

in the most undisciplined, irreverent

and original manner possible.”

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Richard Feynman

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“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.

Try to make sense of what you see

and wonder about what makes the universe exist.

Be curious.

And however difficult life may seem,

there is always something you can do and succeed at.

It matters that you don’t just give up.”

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Stephen Hawking

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Woodland Gnome 2018

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“The mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be kindled.”

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Plutarch

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Sunday Dinner: Complex

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“Abandon the urge to simplify everything,

to look for formulas and easy answers,

and to begin to think multidimensionally,

to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life;

not to be dismayed by the multitude

of causes and consequences

that are inherent in each experience –

– to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”

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M. Scott Peck

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“This is the time for every artist in every genre

to do what he or she does loudly and consistently.

It doesn’t matter to me what your position is.

You’ve got to keep asserting the complexity

and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it,

and the facets of it.

This is about being a complex human being in the world,

not about finding a villain.

This is no time for anything else

than the best that you’ve got.”

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Toni Morrison

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“Today the network of relationships

linking the human race to itself

and to the rest of the biosphere

is so complex that all aspects affect all others

to an extraordinary degree.

Someone should be studying the whole system,

however crudely that has to be done,

because no gluing together of partial studies

of a complex nonlinear system

can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. ”

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Murray Gell-Mann

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“Simplicities are enormously complex.

Consider the sentence “I love you”.”

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Richard O. Moore 

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2018

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“Complexity is the blending of perfect symmetry and pure randomness.

This is where the arrow of time lives.

I think these two extremes are elusive ideals.”

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R.A.Delmonico

Wednesday Vignette: Dogwood in Bloom

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“You are the beloved child of this universe,

so live as if everything is yours.

Every morning the sun is rising for you.

The rays of light are kissing you,

birds are singing for you,

flowers are dancing for you,

and everything belongs to you.”

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Debasish Mridha

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“I love to see the bud bursting into maturity;

I love to mark the deepening tints

with which the beams of heaven paint

the expanded flower;

nay, with a melancholy sort of pleasure,

I love to watch that progress towards decay,

so endearingly bespeaking a fellowship

in man’s transient glory”

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Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

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“I’m on the side of whatever keeps the flowers growing.”

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Marty Rubin

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2017

 

 

Layers

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Color lies in layers,

like a living, moving quilt

blanketing the garden,

 preparing for winter slumber.

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Soak  in every vibrant tint and hue

While one may;

While life vibrates

From petal and leaf, berry and seed.

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What more can one do

than wrap oneself, too, in such beauty?

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Woodland Gnome 2015

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Portrait of A Tree

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“The nature of creation,

which is beyond time, space, and causality,

is self-revealing

and presents itself to the consciousness of Awareness

as a gift of the Presence. 

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“All things are intrinsically holy

in the divinity of their creation.

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“Art seeks to abstract this awareness

when it takes one moment in time

and freezes it in photographic art or sculpture. 

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“Each stop frame depicts the perfection

that can be appreciated only when a single view is isolated

from the distortion of the superimposed story.

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“The drama of every moment of existence

lends itself to preservation

when art saves it

from the extinction of transformation of material form… “

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Dr. David R. Hawkins

from The Eye of the I

 

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Photos by Woodland Gnome 2015

Bright and Beautiful

Forsythia

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The garden looks bright and beautiful today with golden October sunshine on our colorful leaves.

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Dogwood

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We are still on the early side of the transition here, with many trees still green.  Others have a halo of color along their silhouette, or sport leaves with mottled color.  We enjoy the beautiful transition from green to bold before they brown and blow away.

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We enjoy colorful foliage throughout the season, and select plants for the garden with interesting and colorful leaves.

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Some of these, like purple sage, will remain unchanged as winter approaches.

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This Afghan fig will grow into a small tree.

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I’ve read several articles this week about winter gardens.  While we don’t have much man made architecture, we enjoy the living sculpture of deciduous trees, hollies, Camellias, and a few conifers.  We have added many shrubs for winter interest in the garden during our short time here, and now many of them have begun to grow into their promise.  Our Hellebores are spreading and we have added many evergreen ferns.

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Camellias growing through Dogwood

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I catch myself imagining what the garden will look like after the frosts cut back the tender growth in a few weeks.  Some of our new Camellias are now covered with buds.  But they are hidden behind Cannas and other leaves at the moment.  It won’t be long until they come back into view, shining in the winter sunshine.

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Yesterday was Garden Blogger’s Foliage Day.  I’ve been taking photos of our beautiful leaves all week, focusing on the special beauty of our forest garden now, in late October.

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We are blessed with many interesting trees and shrubs in our garden.  Most have been here now for decades, but we have planted several dozen more.  We love their foliage, their bark, their flowers, and the shade they give.  We enjoy the variety of birds who visit to eat their berries, feed on insects living in them, and find shelter in their branches.

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A friend, who understands my love for trees, gave me an article last night written by an English gardener who has experienced the loss of Ash and other trees to various pests and diseases around  in the English countryside.  She wrote poignantly about how trees give us a sense of place.  They define our familiar landscapes.  They create our beautiful spaces which make us feel ‘at home.’

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American Holly

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While every tree has a lifespan, most live much longer than do we humans.  We expect the trees of our lives to live on past us.  We know that most mature trees were here long before we were born.  We see them as stalwart and as a fixture of our lives we may depend upon.

It is always a bit shocking when one comes down in a storm or dies of a blight.  It is heartbreaking when wildfires claim them.

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Leyland Cypress

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The author spoke about our rapidly changing landscapes, and how our children and grandchildren may grow accustomed to losing trees and forests; seeing meadows developed into shopping centers; and wooded areas cut for subdivisions in a way earlier generations have not.  When we lose our landscape, we lose something of our sense of place, our feeling of familiarity and ‘home.’

Our community in particular, and the east coast of the United States in general, have lost many beautiful old trees in recent years during storms.  A friend lost more than two dozen of her mature trees during a hurricane a few years back.  You could play softball in her front yard now, which once was like an arboretum.  We’ve lost so many trees to storms that many neighbors call in crews to simply cut those trees near their homes, before they can fall on a car or deck, or worse.

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While I understand their fears, I mourn for the lost trees.   And so we plant, and nurture as many of the volunteers as we can allow to grow.

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Crepe Myrtle growing back from its roots, and newly sprouted Beautyberry

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And each autumn, we celebrate our beautiful trees.  If you have lost trees in recent years, I hope you have planted new ones to replace those you lost.

There are many beautiful choices available now.  Many of the newer trees have disease resistance, improved foliage, and other desirable qualities.  And this is the perfect time to plant new trees across much of the United States.  It is a gesture of love; a gesture of faith, and a gesture of hope for a beautiful future.

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Our newly planted Magnolia stellata tree will look beautiful next spring.

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You might enjoy visiting Christina to see her beautiful garden in the Hesperides in its October glory.  She has done quite a bit of renovation this year, and it is lovely now that her new plants have settled in.  You’ll find links to many other beautiful gardens from around the world.  We can draw ideas and inspiration from them all.

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Woodland Gnome 2015