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Tupelos and the Dogwoods — Part 2

The grace and beauty of the leaves, with their channelled, curving, parallel veins, must strike one in summertime. Before they change colour the clustered fruits, standing where the flowers stood, burn bright against the leafy background. These shining, waxy berries are never lost to view, even when the foliage takes on shades of crimson and scarlet. They deepen and intensify these royal colours until the hungry birds have taken the last one.

The leaves have fallen, and left behind a bare grey tree, set with multitudes of buds, pledge of next year's flowers and leaves and fruit. The artist will tell you, if you press him (for he doesn't force his notions upon his friends), that the dogwood wears its finest colours in the winter time! Go out into the woods in late February or early March, just when willows and aspens show green--just a hint of it!--through their telltale bark. All the other early trees wear that "rapt, expectant look" that precedes the bold casting off of bud scales. The silky twigs and velvety buds of the dogwood, alive and thrilling with the stir of the sap, show marvellous tones of olive and grey and lavender, with deeper purple shadows and warm hints of red. These are the colours that Japanese artists revel in.

Most people miss all of the loveliness of graceful line and delicate colour harmony revealed by leafless trees. I am happy to say it is a curable form of blindness. By taking thought, one can learn to see the beauty of balance and symmetry that give strength and grace to the frame of a tree, and beauty of form to the dead teazel and mullein stalks under it. One can learn to see the purple with the dun in the autumn grain fields, and the blue in the hemlock shadows on the snow. We may not all be painters, but we may enter into some of the joys the artist finds in the common things about us. Next spring will be a good time to watch the grey bud scales expand, turn green, then pink and white. From April on we may see the steps by which the miracle progresses.

Flowering dogwoods do not grow wild in any country but ours. They are being exterminated in many places. They are cut for the paltry bit of lumber yielded by their spindling trunks. It ought to be a capital crime to cut a single one. They are destroyed for less cause. Here is an example. A hermit lived alone in a strip of woods along a little Michigan lake. He loved trees and plants, and kept this area a veritable Nature's garden, and willed it to the nearby city on his death. The park commissioners, when they had spread their thanks upon the records, took immediate steps "to put the grounds in shape." Two strong labourers were sent in to clear it up. They cut out all the dogwoods--"because they didn't trim up straight!" Lower limbs, small trees and underbrush were all sacrificed to make straight the paths of picnic parties; and to get a nice sod started, and have a park! The gentle donor of this tract would have broken his heart over the look of it when these improvements (?) were completed. Though he "leaned out from the gold bar of heaven," I think he must have hurled imprecations down upon the stupidity which undid all he had so lovingly and intelligently done, but chiefly upon the slothful and incompetent commissioners who trusted such work to such hands. Only the people themselves, intelligent and vigilant, can defend themselves from such maltreatment, and save from destruction natural beauty which belongs to all.

The Dogwood (Cornus Nuttallii, Aud.), of the Pacific coast, occasionally reaches 100 feet in height in the forest opposite Vancouver Island. It grows tall and slim, and thus does not commend itself to gardeners as its Eastern relative does. Its flowers are very much like it in colouring and form, though much more conspicuous because twice as large. The bracts do not cover the flowers in the buds, and are not notched at the tip when developed. There are often six instead of four of them.

This dogwood seems not to thrive outside its native woods, on the mountain slopes from British Columbia to southern California. But here it is easily first in a land of splendid flowering trees, leaning upon the sombre evergreens, in its snowy spring robes and its rich scarlet autumnal garb--a spectacle never to be forgotten once it is seen.

The Rough-leaved Dogwood (C. asperifolia, Michx.) has long been classed among the shrubby species. It becomes tree-like in southern Arkansas and eastern Texas, sometimes reaching a height of 50 feet. As a shrub it is distributed from Ontario to Minnesota and Nebraska, and south into the Gulf States.