White and Greenish 



Preferred Habitat — Woodhmds, rocky thickets, wooded roadsides. 



Floivering Season — April — J une. 



Distribution — Maine to Florida, west to Ontario and Texas. 



Has Nature's garden a more decorative ornament than the 

 flowering dogwood, whose spreading flattened branches whiten 

 the woodland borders in May as if an untimely snowstorm had 

 come down upon them, and in autumn paint the landscape with 

 glorious crimson, scarlet, and gold, dulled by comparison only with 

 the clusters of vivid red berries among the foliage ? Little wonder 

 that nurserymen sell enormous numbers of these small trees to 

 be planted on lawns. The horrors of pompous monuments, 

 urns, busts, shafts, angels, lambs, and long-drawn-out eulogies in 

 stone in many a cemetery are mercifully concealed in part by 

 these boughs, laden with blossoms of heavenly purity. 



" Let dead names be eternized in dead stone. 

 But living names hy living shafts be l<nown. 

 Plant thou a tree whose leaves shall sing 

 Thy deeds and thee each fresh, recurrent spring." 



Fit symbol of immortality ! Even before the dogwood's 

 leaves fallin autumn, the round buds for next year's bloom appear 

 on the twigs, to remain in consoling evidence all winter with the 

 scarlet fruit. When the buds begin to swell in spring, the four 

 reddish-purple, scale-like bracts expand, revealing a dozen or more 

 tiny green flowers clustered within ; for the large, white, petal- 

 like parts, with notched, tinted, and puckered lips, into which 

 these redciish bracts speedily develop, and which some of us have 

 mistaken for a corolla, are not petals at all — not the true flowers — 

 merely appendages around the real ones, placed there, like showy 

 advertisements, to attract customers. Nectar, secreted in a disk on 

 each minute ovary, is eagerlv sought by little Andrena and other 

 bees, besides flies and butterflies. Insects crawling about these 

 clusters, whose florets are all of one kind, get their heads and un- 

 dersides dusted with pollen, which they transfer as they suck. 

 Hungry winter birds, which bolt the red fruit only when they can 

 get no choicer fare, distribute the smooth, indigestible stones far 

 and wide. 



When the Massachusetts farmers think they hear the first 

 brown thrasher in April advising them to plant their Indian corn, 

 reassuringly calling, "Drop it, drop it — cover it up, cover it up — 

 pull it up, pull it up, pull it up" (Thoreau), they look to the dog- 

 wood flowers to confirm the thrasher's advice before taking it. 



The Low or Dwarf Cornel, or Bunchberry (C. Canadensis), 

 whose scaly stem does its best to attain a height of nine inches, 

 bears a whorl of from four to six oval, pointed, smooth leaves 



227 



