October Dogwoods

Dogwoods are beautiful in October.

Really.    You can't beat that color.



  





 Our dogwoods turn red.   It's a glorious color against the sky.


Dogwoods have an active autumn life.   They're very busy getting ready for next year - moreso than you see on a lot of other trees.







Dogwoods set fruit.   It's beautiful scarlet fruit, in clusters where there were flowers this year.   The fruit is full of lipids and is very nutritious.  Birds love it and strip the trees pretty quickly so a lot of people never realize that dogwoods bear fruit. 

The real surprise is that dogwoods set flower buds in the fall.   Look for them!





They're little balls at the tips of the smallest branches.   You can tell how many flowers your dogwood will have next year, right now.

Trees with white flowers

The night after we first saw this place [in February], I had a dream that it was a valley full of trees with white flowers.   We moved here in March and that first spring, we realized that we did indeed have a lot of trees with white flowers in the hollow.   They were honey locust trees.  They have deliciously fragrant white flowers and terrifying thorns - the guardians of the hollow.   However, we didn't have any dogwoods. 

In Indiana, that was an anomaly.  Indiana wants to be forest.   The first trees to start forest in Indiana are the dogwoods and redbuds - the understory trees.   We didn't have any dogwoods or any redbuds.    150 years of cows on a place will do that, I guess.  

Well, we didn't have cows and though we did have sheep,  the sheep didn't have the run of every inch of the place, so in time, we started getting dogwoods and redbuds.   

I mowed around every single one I could find.    They were all allowed to stay.  

It was a pain, but it was worth it.

Now our hollow is full of trees with white flowers.