Dogwood blooms

Eastern dogwood in bloom

As anticipated, the dogwood is starting to bloom in the forest at Roundtop. The showy white blossoms, often tinged with a deep pink, are appearing all over the mountain. Dogwood is one of those blooming trees you have to see to believe. They are so beautiful that they don’t seem real.

Roundtop is a forest filled with oak, beech and hickory trees, the kind of forest that produces nuts—acorns, hickory nuts, etc. And then spring arrives and along the forest edges appears this wild proliferation of blooms. For a little while it simply doesn’t look like the same forest.

So far, the dogwood trees here on Roundtop appear to be healthy. A fungus has damaged or killed many trees elsewhere. I look at the leaves and the twigs here on the mountain for signs up of it, and so far I haven’t found any.  I hope I never do.