Take to the woods for spring flowers
By By Gail Barton / horticulture columnist
April 6, 2003
Spring is the most hectic time of the year for me. I am so busy, that I barely have time to enjoy the seasonal flowers. Some of my favorites are the native trees and shrubs found in Meridian gardens and in the surrounding woods.
Flowering dogwood (cornus Florida) is a native tree that has been cultivated in gardens since the 1700s. The dogwood's true flowers are inconspicuous and greenish yellow in a small rounded cluster.
These true flowers are noticed by most folks only because they are surrounded by four colored leaves or bracts. The bracts are milky white and are called "petals" by everyone except the botanists. They attract attention to the flowers that are produced in abundance on bare branches before the leaves emerge.
Meridian has some of the most beautiful stands of dogwood that I've ever seen. One of my former students, Tony Sansone, says we need to celebrate this annual flowering with a Dogwood Festival like the citizens of Pollock, La.
Since flowering dogwood is a small tree, it may reach 30 feet only with great age. It grows best in the shade of larger trees and has unusual grayish bark that forms a checkerboard pattern on gnarled old limbs and trunks. Dogwood's limbs tend to spread from the trunk in horizontal layers that give the tree an interesting growth habit.
While the flowers are the most notable landscape feature, dogwood also has a beautiful fall and winter fruit display. After flowering, oblong berry-like fruit forms.
This fruit turns red in fall. It provides excellent forage for at least 28 species of birds and is usually all eaten up by Christmas time. Dogwood fruit is also consumed by game animals like quail, turkey, squirrel and deer.
Dogwood foliage provides good color in the fall as well. The red, orange and yellow leaves have found their way into many a fall color collection.
Dogwoods have had many commercial and medicinal uses over the years. The wood is very dense and strong and was once used to make shuttles, spindles, tool handles and golf club heads. The powdered bark was used as a treatment for fevers and malaria. The name "dogwood" came into use because our dogwood's English cousin supplied bark used to wash mangy dogs.
Granthus Graybeard, Grancey Graybeard or Fringe Tree is another small woodland tree that will soon bloom. This tree's genus name chionanthus comes from two Greek words meaning "snow flower." It's easy to see why when this diminutive beauty begins its dazzling white flower show.
Granthus Graybeard has strap-shaped drooping flowers that give the tree an airy quality and look to some like drifting snow. After flowering, some trees bear oblong blue berry-like fruit that is relished by wildlife. Granthus Graybeard does well in sun or part shade. It has nice yellow fall color and rarely reaches a height above 15 feet.
Just yesterday, I noticed the first native azalea or honeysuckle azalea in bloom. These fragrant native shrubs are called honeysuckle by the locals but are actually wild azaleas. They grace the woods all around Meridian. In town there is also a nice planting on the grounds at East Mississippi State Hospital.
When you pass the hospital early in the morning, they seem to float like buoyant pink clouds. Our local forms are pink or white but the garden centers usually sell a yellow to orange flowering species as well. I've planted several of both colors in my backyard so I can enjoy the fragrance of the flowers from my deck.
I appreciate the native woody trees and shrubs that bloom in spring, but don't always have time to walk in the woods to see them. I've planted all three of these in my shaded back yard so that even in a busy spring, I don't miss a thing.
