The Tupelos and the Dogwoods 



across, on short lateral branches. Fruits, October, dark blue, 

 berry-like, J inch across, on red peduncles; nutlets i to 2, grooved. 

 Preferred habiiai, moist, well-drained soil. Distribution, Nova 

 Scotia to Minnesota; south to Georgia and Alabama. Uses: 

 Handsome ornamental tree. 



Dogwoods are among the fev/ native trees Vv^ith simple and 

 opposite leaves this is a fact well worth remembering. It is a 

 key to many secrets of the woods. The most uninformed person 

 can know by this simple means that a certain tree he never saw 

 before is likely a viburnum, a maple or a dogwood. The ashes 

 and buckeyes have opposite leaves, too, but they are compound. 

 The dogwood we are now considering is an exception to the rule 

 of its family; it has alternate, instead of opposite, leaves. The 

 blades have the general characteristics of the other dogwood 

 leaves, but hang on longer stems. They turn in autumn to the 

 soft, melancholy blue-reds, which seem to belong to the shadowy 

 places the tree commonly frequents. An open situation is 

 required to bring out the tints of scarlet and orange the colours 

 with sunshine and laughter in them. 



On the margins of woods this platform dogwood shows to 

 best advantage its shelving mode of branch arrangement. These 

 striking and beautiful tiers or platforms of branches, leafy to the 

 trunk, considered alone would make this tree popular as an 

 ornamental. The flowers are showy by their numbers, though 

 they lack the coloured bracts that belong to the other two dog- 

 wood trees. The black fruits also are profuse and noticeable upon 

 their coral-red branching stems. 



Shrubby Dogwoods 



Our American woods are rich in shrubby dogwoods, whose 

 beauty earns them places in our gardens and shrubbery borders. 

 There is the white-berried red-osier dogwood (C. siolonifera), 

 whose many smooth stems gleam like red-hot pokers in the winter 

 sunlight against the background of an evergreen hedge. The 

 little kinnikinick, or silky cornel (C. Amomum), adds to its 

 purplish stems the charm of silky leaves, with white flowers 

 and pale-blue berries in broad, loose cymes. Bailey's dogwood 

 (C. Baileyi) looks grey because of the upturning of the silk-lined 

 leaves. The rich red of its twigs in winter and the colours of its 



415 



