Growing up, there was a dogwood tree (probably Cornus florida, flowering dogwood) directly behind my parents' house. It was a good size for easy kid climbing - not big, but user-friendly. It was perhaps one of the top ten trees that I was most intimately familiar with, physically, from the simple act of climbing and spending time around it. If, say, as a ten-year-old I had to tie my identity to a particular tree, it may well have been this one - a deciduous, temperate North American tree, loved equally by squirls and ten-year-old boys.
Many years later, while staying on Shelter Island, my mother pointed out a Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa), a very attractive tree covered with creamy white flowers. It is the stylized, Japanese version of the plain vanilla dogwood that I grew up with. It is more of an aesthetic experience than a physical one. Interestingly, these two dogwoods, kousa and florida, in addition to being around the same size, are closely related.
So there you have it - one lifetime, two dogwoods.
No comments:
Post a Comment