Dogwood Tales

Blossoms cover the tree a young driver once decapitated

When I visit other people's gardens, I love to hear the stories associated with their plants. Today I'll share with you a few of my own dogwood tales.

The freebie that bifurcated

One tree started out more than twenty years ago as volunteer under the live oak in the front yard. Back then I had a front lawn and didn't want to mow over the tiny tree. I dug the volunteer up and moved it to the back yard where I planted it in a depression created, I suspect, when Hurricane Hugo uprooted a tree. At one time this transplanted volunteer looked beautiful. The year my daughter married, a ring of shasta daisies encircled its trunk, but in recent years it began to look bedraggled. I thought it must be diseased. Just over a year ago I talked to the arborist about cutting it down. He convinced me to let him shape it up instead. I'm glad he did. 

A few months after I transplanted the volunteer, a mature dogwood close to the street met tragedy on Palm Sunday, when a young driver failed to make a curve and his car sailed through my front yard. The hit-and-run driver decapitated the dogwood. I planned to have the remains cut down but the elderly neighbor across the street loved the tree and sent his yardman over to tend to it. It survived. Now it serves as a wide screen - and blooms like crazy. 

One tree is a replacement for a drought-stricken dogwood I had cut down back in the mid-nineties. My dermatologist drove past my house daily on his way downtown and noticed my dead, and then missing, tree. He dropped off a volunteer he'd dug up in his own yard further down the street. It grows in the small flower bed where its predecessor once stood and has survived several subsequent droughts.

A few blossoms on the tree the dermatologist gave me

Another dogwood bifurcated. It and a cedar  were freebies given away by a governmental agency during the Southeastern Wildlife Exhibition several years ago. It's hard to resist a free tree. 

My smallest dogwood is one of perhaps ten the Arbor Day Foundation sent a few years ago in exchange for a small donation. It's the only member of its group to survive - assuming it's still alive. It has barely grown at all and hasn't leafed out yet this year.

And finally, there was one that I particularly loved. Another volunteer. It grew near the house. It looked quite handsome standing between a mass of white-blossomed azaleas and a pittosporum, but quickly grew tall and began to push against an overhanging shingle. The tree doctor said it had to go. I still miss it.

Around here dogwoods in bloom are a sign that spring has arrived

My first dogwood volunteer, much older now, elegant after the arborist shaped it up

I hope you'll share your own dogwood tales in the comment section below. You don't have to register to comment.

The morning after a rain storm

An Unrelated Note: The Volunteer Almond

Earlier this week, while working in my garden, I noticed that a seedling had emerged from the ground approximately a foot away from the almond tree I planted in January of last year. The leaves on the seedling looked much like those on a nearby peach tree.  The almond tree grows next to the former site of a compost heap and is dressed with compost. I wondered whether a peach pit had sprouted.

I dug the seedling up and, much to my surprise, found a sprouted almond still attached. The almond certainly didn't come from my  tree. The tree didn't produce last year. Apparently the almond was one dropped indoors and relegated to the compost pile. 

Did the young almond tree mentor this seedling? Sound crazy? PBS recently aired a program about the influence plants have on each other. 

I've transplanted this infant tree to a location where it has more room to grow. But will it survive its first hot, miserable Lowcountry summer?

The Cupola House Gardens Revisited

Thursday as I drove along US Highway 17 through North Carolina I began to taste Thanksgiving flavors a week early. I wasn't actually eating anything. The leaf color, though, so thoroughly autumn, brought to mind the flavors of turkey gravy, stuffing, pumpkin pie. I could almost smell the cinnamon and nutmeg seasoning in the imaginary dessert. I salivated as I drove past leaves the color of butterscotch and persimmon.  

The Cupola House

Detouring from Highway 17, I headed to the Cupola House in Edenton, the location of the colonial revival gardens I first visited and photographed in May. Mrs. Torres at Emilio's General Store & Take Away on South Broad Street told me I was in luck - the garden volunteers had just finished weeding the previous day.   

These pink roses might seem to belong to spring or summer

According to the Cupola House Gardens brochure "Donald Parker, a landscape architect with Colonial Williamsburg, designed these gardens based roughly on the second of C.J. Sauthier's 1769 maps of Edenton."  

Cyclamen emerge amongst autumn leaves 

Claude Joseph Sauthier, a native of Strasbourg, France, trained in surveying, architecture, and landscape gardening, and was brought to North Carolina by Governor Tryon. In an essay entitled "People and Plants: North Carolina's Garden History Revisited" (British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Robert P. Maccubbin and Peter Martin, 1984, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia), author John Flowers writes "Some have suggested that the garden plots that appear in most of [the] town plans were used merely to decorate the maps...But Sauthier was too careful a draftsman and accurate surveyor to ornament his work so casually." 

Yellow - an expected color for autumn flowers

Not all of the plants placed, in accordance with Parker's design, at the Cupola House Gardens survived. Over the years garden volunteers have made changes as necessary to the landscape with a pleasing result.

A ginko tree with bright yellow leaves grows beside the house and next to Broad Street

The herb garden with pomegranate trees in the background

My Garden Update
Some species of insect that loves tomatoes also feasted on the skin of my pomegranates this year. Better luck next year, perhaps?

The leaves on my dogwood trees never turn such a vibrant red but where I live we don't usually have a cold snap before the leaves have dropped. (Crape myrtle tree on the left, dogwoods center and right.)

To learn more about Edenton's Cupola House, visit the website:  www.cupolahouse.org