The Urban Pantheist

We stayed inside for a long while, but finally around 8:30 we went out to shovel. The first thing I noticed was our dying dogwood tree lost a couple branches. I think it's finished.

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You can so much more in the winter. The street is Longwood Ave, the big building is part of the storied and controversial Longwood Towers. You can also see the trolley tracks and the train tunnel under Longwood Ave. The big trees are northern red oaks, old enough to have been standing by the river when Olmsted designed the park. The little ess shaped tree is a flowering dogwood I've tried to photograph many times.

Urban species #121: Flowering dogwood Cornus florida

The spring parade of flowering trees marches on! Flowering in Boston shortly after saucer magnolia, but more or less concurrently with cherries and flowering crabapples, is the cheery little flowering dogwood. Unlike the vast majority of urban plantings in eastern North America, this tree is native to our area. Unfortunately, it requires fairly moist, rich, unpolluted soil, a rare commodity in the urban ecosystem. Left to their own devices, they would disappear, but since they are such attractive additions to the landscape, they are popularly used.

Besides their beautiful flowers, flowering dogwoods also provide edible fruits which are prized by urban birds. Mockingbirds and cedar waxwings will eat them, if the starlings haven't already eaten them all.

The popularity of this tree in the United States is reflected by the fact of it being the state flower of Virginia and North Carolina, as well as the state tree of Virginia and Missouri.

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