From “Names” in Self-Portrait with Dogwood by Christopher Merrill:
“Cornus means ‘of the horn’ and is related to the Latin words for tusk, the horns of the crescent moon, the wing of an army, a musical instrument played by Roman soldiers, the end of a book or scroll, power, strength, might. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Florida‘ begins, ‘The state with the prettiest name.’ The same holds for the botanical name of the dogwood native to the eastern United States, Cornus florida, which may be translated as ‘flowering horn.’
“It is surely one of the prettiest trees in forests and backyards from Maine to Florida and westward to Illinois — a small nesting tree, rarely more than forty feet tall, with opposite or adjacent pairs of oval leaves and clusters of what botanists call perfect inconspicuous yellow flowers, surrounded by four white or pink petal-like leaves known as bracts. Its bark, ridged and broken, is said to resemble the hide of an alligator…. White-tailed deer and rabbits feed on its twigs and leaves, and in the fall its scarlet fruit, which is mildly poisonous to humans, provides food for squirrels, foxes, beavers, skunks, and black bears, as well as thirty-six species of birds, including bobwhites, cardinals, cedar waxwings, robins, mockingbirds, wild turkeys, and woodpeckers.
“It is an understory tree, which grows in the shade of the forest canopy….”
From “A Cold Spring” in The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop:
A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born….
The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practised leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south….
Hello!
For this post and the next one, we have a study of an old dogwood tree that I’ve previously photographed (see, for example,Dogwoods with White Blooms (1 of 2) and Dogwoods with White Blooms (2 of 2) from 2023) at Oakland Cemetery.
On most of those earlier trips, I tended to focus on closeups of small clusters of the dogwood’s flowers, since — especially on sunny days — it can be challenging to get a satisfactory photograph of larger sections of the tree. The combination of bright sunlight and the tree’s massive quantity of individual white flowers would make it difficult to find a focal point for the composition that wasn’t just overpowered with white light. The overcast day I took this batch of photos on, however, gave me a chance to examine the tree from different perspectives and zoom levels and capture it more as a whole tree than individual branches and flowers. Not having to contend with too much backlighting in particular meant it was possible to observe and capture details that would have otherwise gotten lost in the light.
Let’s talk about the first four photos below, as they show off some of a dogwood tree’s unique characteristics. This is most likely Cornus florida — a dogwood common to many regions, and quite prevalent in and native to the U.S. Southeast. What is conventionally referred to as this dogwood’s flower or bloom is a more complex structure, consisting in part of tiny, conical flowers at the center surrounded by white (or sometimes pink or red) petal-like bracts — whose job is to attract pollinators to visit the less visible yellow-green flowers.
Dogwood branches often extend wider than the tree’s height, so the tree in bloom occupies a much larger horizontal space than other trees with trunks of similar height. That the branches reach or stretch as far as they do creates a striking visual effect, as each row of branches tends to alternate with other rows in slightly overlapping layers. When photographed at wider angles, the tree gives the impression that it’s too wide for its height, especially since the main trunk (or typical split trunk, in this case) leans toward the reaching branches at about a 30-degree angle. You might think it’s going to fall over; but it’s really just trying to get your attention with this somewhat contradictory design.
The dogwood’s branching pattern is often described as a fishbone or herringbone effect, something that becomes more evident as you study (or photograph) the tree. And the effect is especially noticeable during the tree’s blooming season, as the branches extend in opposing directions over each other. Once the leaves appear, much of the space occupied by the blooms will get filled in, and the contrast between white bracts and the surrounding landscape is less apparent. That the branches are gnarly adds to the effect: they don’t proceed straight out from the tree, but instead appear to twist in multiple directions as their terraces of flowers seek out the light. On those layered, threaded branches, the blooms float like a blizzard of snowflakes in even the slightest breeze. The effect carries through to the photographs (I hope), and I should add just for fun that I had to take several breaks while working on the photos: the intense contrast between the white petals and the rest of the photo caused me a bit of snow blindness as they seemed to light up my desk and the corner of my office.
This tree — accurately described as an understory tree in the quotation at the top of this post — grows in the shade of several taller oaks, maples, and a magnolia tree nearby, but its branches reach with great determination in the opposite direction, toward the sun rising over the cemetery’s gardens. The third photo below shows that directionality: on cloudless mornings, the sun would be seen rising over the buildings in the background.
I tried to cajole the tree into revealing its age; but no matter how many times I questioned the trunk, it refused to answer. In dogwood-years, though, it’s probably in its middle or late middle age — six to eight decades as evidenced by its height (thirty to forty feet), the diameter of and split in the trunk, and the wide sweep of its branches. Architectural structures surrounding it are even older than that, but it’s not likely that the dogwood has been there since the late nineteenth century and was probably planted in the mid-twentieth. Nevertheless, it does, at this point, fit so well with the aesthetic qualities of what’s around it that it’s easy to think of it as a tree as ancient as the property where it flourishes, protected by the trees around it and well-maintained by the garden’s caretakers.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
