Those Dogwoods
Jennifer, I have no idea what a kousa is, but here are three early morning photos. Nearly every block has a tree or two. Jeffrey tells me the Rhododendrons will blossom with the late blooming azaleas. Maybe you should move here rak? I guess the vistas in Colorado outweigh the two week growing season.
I am pretty sure that the first picture is of a kousa dogwood, and the second and third pictures are the old-fashioned kind. It’s hard for me to tell without a close-up. When you can see the final 3-5 branchings of a branch-tip on a old-fashioned dogwood, the twigs look like your fingers would if you were holding your hand palm-up and supporting a beach-ball on your finger tips. The dogwood flowers would be relatively horizontal on those finger tips. Oddly, the white or pink parts aren’t the petals, but are the sepals which (on most flowers) are small and green, and under the petals. So the reason I think the first picture is a kousa dogwood is the flowers don’t seem to be horizontal. The other two … the trunk looks right for old-fashioned, I’ve never seen a pink kousa, I can’t see the flowers well enough and I wanted at least some of these photos to be of “real” dogwoods.
When my grandmother could no longer drive because she was nearly blind I sometimes drove down to RI to take her for groceries and to appointments. One May she exclaimed (as I drove along the road at 40 mph, 10 miles from her house), “the viburnum is early this year!” I asked her how she knew it was a viburnum.
Comment by Jennifer — April 29, 2006 @ 6:23 pm
How did she know?
Comment by michael — April 29, 2006 @ 7:16 pm
Thanks, Michael. I left that dangling to see if anyone was reading. (What I REALLY want to know is if LaChica read “The Hardest Call” and what she thought.)
She knew by the color, the shape of the whole thing, the overall effect of the splotches of white, the time of year, and her memory of that stretch of road. That was when I first realized that one COULD do that with trees, and began to start paying more attention.
Since then, I’ve thought a lot about how some knowledge in an arena makes you so much more able to make and remember additional observations/details.
Comment by Jennifer — April 30, 2006 @ 7:09 am