Growing up, this was a dogwood to me.
When I arrived in Vancouver and people said “Isn’t the dogwood pretty?” …. I looked down in confusion while they looked up, and then at me in confusion.
To people here, and elsewhere obviously, a dogwood is a tall tree covered in (eventually) white (or sometimes pink) bracts that people call flowers. The flowers are actually the little things in the middle.
I did not know, until one of my labmates informed me one day, that the “flowers” (bracts) are green when immature and eventually turn white. She told me this because she was trying to figure out how the tree outside her window suddenly had a profusion of white “flowers” when there had not been any visible buds.
But back home, in the central interior, these little ground dwelling dogwoods were a familiar favourite of mine. Native and white prolific in the forest floor around our cabin, they were a happy harbinger of warmer weather and their white faces brought bright spots to the undergrowth.
So down here, on the coast, the dogwoods are tall and splendid….at home they are small and discrete. It’s not the only example of confused identification of plants here vs there….let’s not forget the huckleberry…..which back home is a fantastically delicious little purple berry, smaller than a blueberry but otherwise quite similar, that grows on a low shrubby bush. When I arrived here and someone said “oooh…huckleberries!” and started picking red berries, resembling red currants but produced singly rather than in bunches, on a tall dainty plant with delicate leaves.
I thought “What have you been eating lady…the wrong mushrooms?!?”
Turns out there is a thing called a coastal huckleberry….but it doesn’t even begin to look or taste similar to a mountain huckleberry…so what’s up with that!
At least the “flower” on a ground-dwelling dogwood resembles the ones found on a dogwood tree!
On the way home from the hatchery today, tired after working a day I’d intended to take off in lieu for working a flex day last week at the end of a week of travel, but a bit satisfied because I really do get a ton of work done when I am at the hatchery relative to the downtown office….I was marching along one of the paths through the forest trails and spotted that familiar little blotch of white….
It’s interesting that I didn’t notice them before, because this is the third spring that I’ve been plying these trails for work purposes. But this is the first spring in three years that I am not lost in a haze of anger, having raging dialogues inside my head, on those walks home, so perhaps that’s why I finally noticed them.
And, because I am a scientist at heart and always like fun educational facts….the Cornus canadensis is also an athlete!
Each flower (the actual flower, not the bracts or the white thing that looks like a flower but isn’t) has highly elastic petals that flip backward, releasing springy filaments that are cocked underneath the petals. The filaments snap upward flinging pollen out of containers hinged to the filaments. The stamens accelerate at a rate of 24,000 m/s2. The motion, which can be triggered by pollinators, takes place in less than half a millisecond. This dogwood has one of the fastest plant actions found so far, requiring a camera capable of shooting 10,000 frames per second to catch the action. ~ Wikipedia
Happy Friday 🙂