“Of course, the flowers are what make the dogwood. Just the mere mention of the name dogwood conjures up images of sprightly spring days of crystal blue skies, fresh morning breezes, and the clear proud glow of a flowering dogwood in bloom.
“While this does a bit of injustice to the entire clan (by far, most dogwoods don’t have flowers that most casual observers would call dogwood flowers), for many this is the image of spring. In the eastern and central United States, the Pacific Northwest, throughout much of temperate Asia and parts of Europe, there is probably no better recognized, loved, or planted small flowering tree than Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood. There are dogwood festivals, subdivisions, shopping centers, and more. In Kentucky, we even celebrate annually dogwood winter, that late spring cold snap at dogwood bloom time that reminds us all that the tomato plants we just set out can still experience a rude reminder of Mother Nature’s occasional mean-spirited jokes. No, there are few who would argue the flowering dogwood’s position as top dog among the spring-flowering trees.
“Yet, as many learn in grade school, or at least in an introductory plant materials class, the flowers of Cornus florida aren’t white at all. Of course, the true flowers are yellow to yellow-green and not more than 0.25 inch (6 mm) across. The show is apparent in what are called involucral bracts that subtend the boss of 20 to 30 true flowers. These are the outer protective structures evident in the winter bud that sits at the end of most dormant branches. Still, a sure way to win a quick beer at a spring neighborhood barbeque is to bet the host on the color of his or her dogwood’s flowers. It’s a winner every time.”
Amazing morning — every tree and bush bursting greenly —
weeping cherry in the Japanese garden, lilac fountains skyward now over the pond, now low
at lawn’s rim, white dogwood stretching beyond the old stone walls….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photos of the flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, from Oakland Cemetery. The first post — where I describe my approach to taking and processing these photos, and explain some of the dogwood’s unique design features — is Dogwood Study (1 of 2).
“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….”
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….
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.
“Clematis are now one of the most important groups of garden plants, with dwarf ones, ideal for small gardens, balconies and even window boxes, selling in their millions. The plants have, however, come a long way. The very modestly flowering European species appear to have been grown in gardens from the sixteenth century onwards, but it was the opening up of China and Japan in the nineteenth century that led to the large-flowered hybrids we know today. Far Eastern growers had for centuries had plants with showy flowers and, crucially, a tendency to flower on side shoots. This ability to flower low down makes them very useful as garden plants, as is shown by the habit of growing them on obelisks made from wooden trellis.
“A breakthrough was made in 1858 by the English nurseryman George Jackman, who crossed an existing hybrid with the European C. viticellaand the East Asian C. lanuginosa. The resulting showy, vigorous plant proved a huge success. Meanwhile, C. montana had arrived from the Himalayas, introduced by the wife of the governor general of British India. It too was a great success, clambering up the sides of British country houses, along garden walls and even to the tops of quite substantial trees, smothering everything with pink flowers for a few weeks in early summer….
“From the great botanic gardens of St Petersburg came C. tangutica in the late nineteenth century, a botanical outcome of the ‘great game’, when British and Russian explorers were both investigating, and seeking to dominate, Central Asia. It and similar species are vigorous, and their strangely thick yellow petals are borne, usefully, in late summer.”
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day, I paused and said, ‘I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther — and we shall see.’ The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home…. And then there was a pile of wood… It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled-and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, Or even last year’s or the year’s before. The wood was grey and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken.
Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle….
Hello!
This is the second of two posts featuring photos of resurgent Clematis from my garden. The first post — with my backyard history of these plants — is Hello, Clematis! (1 of 2).
As with the previous post, here we start with some of the buds and vines posing in the morning sun. These are followed by images of full flowers — those with prominent purple or pink stripes through their petals, possibly theClematis lanuginosa variant described in the quotation above. Toward the end, there are closeups of the Clematis flower’s complex central structure.
“The day before the cold and snow began I planted two clematis, knowing snow was predicted. As always, when you find clematis at this time of year in cartons, the plants had already sprouted, and that soft growth will be killed. The alternative is to plant it in a pot, keeping it cool and damp until mid-April, but when I have done that in the past I have neglected the pots and only got the plants set out months later.
“One thing a novice may not know is that the clematis roots, which are like leather shoelaces, are rammed into the little pots and packed with peat to keep them moist. That is good. But when planted in the garden (in a one-cubic-foot hole, with plenty of leaf mold) the roots should be dusted free of the stuff in the little pot and spread out, and the crown of the plant (where the stem joins the roots) set a full two inches below soil level.
“Another thing not obvious to gardeners the first time a clematis is planted is that the stem is quite delicate and brittle where it joins the roots and is easily broken off. Use care when unpotting and never hold the plant by its stem but by its roots.
“Even if the top is killed, new growth will rise from below ground, and by the third year the stems will be like modest ropes and the plant will cover a space the size of a door.”
One day last week, in my back yard whilst I was sound asleep, this happened…
… and me and the dog spent the better part of that day photographing these fresh Clematis flowers, even as they continued opening while the photo session went on. I got a little carried away (as one does!) and ended up with enough photographs for two posts, but it just seemed imperative to capture their images before they started to thin out and drift away. It’s what they wanted, I’m sure….
These Clematis have a story (see Clematis Reincarnated), one that has not yet completed. They were originally among several Clematis plants that I had in pots on my back steps years ago, that got frozen to burnt, black shreds in those pots when we had an extended deep freeze one late winter. As an experiment, I took the crispy remnants of their roots and hopefully transplanted them into a large pot where a Concord grapevine lives (the pot is about three feet high and two feet in diameter, with a steel trellis), hoping they’d find their way back. They didn’t do much the first year — producing just a small handful of flowers — but this year, they seemed to have found their footing (their rooting?) and spread across the top of the pot and up the trellis supporting the grapevine. They want to climb, after all.
There are two or possibly three varieties now flowering among these vines, though most of the flowers resemble that of a Bernadine Clematis (see Bernadine Clematis) I bought about five years ago — with the stripes less prominent than they originally were. This post features Bernadine’s descendants; the next post includes the other varieties, which (unlike the Bernadines) still have distinct purple or violet striping through each of the flower petals, but were not identified with a name other than “Clematis” when I bought them.
These Bernadine progeny, as you can see, might technically be considered white in color now, but in diffused sunlight they take on a light blue cast; and, in warmer sunlight, it’s easy to find violet or purple among the petals. That’s often the case with flowers in blue or purple shades: the color of surrounding light shifts the shades toward cooler (blue) or warmer (purple) tones, and that shift is actually easy to see in programs like Lightroom where they can be rendered in either color (or anywhere in between) and still look natural. As I look at them through the back door, though, they most often show off this dusty or muted light blue, so that’s how I chose to present them here.
In these galleries, we transition from some of the buds and vines with flowers in the background — the vines often make elegant and captivating twists — to single flowers in full, then to closeups of the flower’s central structures. Clematis are members of the Ranunculaceae or Buttercup family, many of which have a similarly complex central structure that contains reproductive organs, colors and shapes that attract pollinators, and of course the valuable pollen the bugs are after that also ensures continued life for the plants.
“The spring Snowflake, Leucojum vernum, which started coming into flower at the beginning of this month, is worth noticing now with a view to future bulb orders. It is one of those things which repay looking closely into, turning its white, green-tipped bell upwards, as you might turn a child’s face upwards by putting your finger under its chin.
“Any right-minded child would resent and resist; the Snowflake has no option. You may then peer into the delicacy of its structure and its markings, always the best way to appreciate the tinies of drooping habit. Not that the Snowflake fails to make its own little effect in the garden. It accompanies the snowdrops and the aconites, and thus is welcome on a dreary morning when every harbinger and prophet means the beginning of spring.
“Practical note: plant the bulbs early, in September. Do not be disappointed if for the first year they do not do much. They need a year to settle down; so, obviously, you must never disturb them again once you have got them established. They like a bit of shade, so are useful to fill up a shady corner where other bulbs might not flourish.”
