It was a great surprise, many years ago, when I first encountered a pagoda dogwood in Herrontown Woods. Though its leaves have the classically arc-shaped veins, this is not the highly ornamental flowering dogwood. Nor is it the silky dogwood often found in floodplains. Also called alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), its discovery took me back to field botany days in the 1970s, when a charismatic University of Michigan botanist, Herb Wagner, introduced us to many of the less common flora.
But the one remaining specimen continued to grow, now more than twenty feet tall, and fortuitously created many progeny when a lower branch touched the ground and took root. Some of these I carefully dug up and divided, then planted in various spots where I'd remember to care for them.
Then, within the past couple years, much to my surprise, I began encountering the distinctive reddish stems of young pagoda dogwoods scattered here and there in the preserve, along a stream or up on the ridge. I'd say they are expanding on their own, without any help from people, but it's also true that the town's deer-culling may have reduced the browsing pressure on native woody plants sufficiently for these younger specimens to grow large enough to be noticed. As they grow, their branching will take on the characteristic tiered, pagoda-like shape.
It's rare, in this tragic time, when treasured species like ash and beech are being laid low by introduced pathogens, to find what looks and feels like a resurgence. This post is written in mid-spring, when the foliage is fresh, the birds have returned, periodic rains soften the soil and feed the vernal pools, and a string of deliciously cool days ease the tending of nature's garden. So much in the world is broken. There is so much to grieve, and yet the woods can still fill one with good news.
Postscript: Another comeback story is the butternut tree, a native that had been laid low but is becoming more numerous in town due to some timely intervention years back, along with some ongoing care. Kind of a fun story: I was telling a resident at Princeton Community Village about the butternut tree the other day. She had never heard of it, but a light went off in her head. Charmingly, the roads at PCV are named after trees. with names like Juniper Row, Sassafras Row, Tupelo Row, and Red Oak Row. She had always wondered why there was also a Butternut Row, which she assumed was named after a squash. Now she knows it too is a tree, one that still grows in Princeton, like and unlike all the others.
