Dogwoods - Its Legends and Winters

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. ~George Washington Carver

If you are a regular here to my blog or on my Facebook page, you know I enjoy the woods and the fields, the flowers and the trees, and the birds and the deer. And of course, dogs and people too. :) So Earth Day seems like a good time to think about those gifts of nature. 

This time of the year, the dogwood trees are bursting into bloom everywhere around here. And we are having that cold snap we seem to always have when the dogwood bloom. We've already had redbud winter, so now it's dogwood winter with a chance for frost tonight. More winters will come our way before spring warms completely into summer.  

I only have one sick dogwood in my yard (I think it's got some kind of blight) and no beautiful pink ones like the one here. I took a picture of this one beside a church in Versailles. The white blooms up top were on a tree in a hay field fence row. I'll have to go walk around that field again before the week is done to see if it's blooming now. 

But have you heard the Legend of the Dogwood?  On Monday I let Jocie on her Heart of Hollyhill blog tell the Legend of the Dogwood as told to her by her Mama Mae. I don't remember who first told me when I was a young teen that the rusty looking stains on the four petals of the dogwood represented the blood of Jesus, but I do remember studying the blooms and thinking about the symbolism. 

However, I had never heard the rest of the legend or read the poem that some think began the legend or perhaps was written by an unknown author because he or she was told the legend. According to the legend, the cross Jesus was crucified on was a dogwood tree that at that time grew tall and big like an oak tree. But the tree was so distraught at being used in the death of Jesus that Jesus had pity on it. He made it grow small and twisty so that it could never be used in such a way again and then marked its beautiful blooms with the nail prints and bloodstains. Even the center has the symbolism of being the crown of thorns. 

Click here to read one version of the legend. It doesn't have any Biblical basis. The dogwood is not mentioned in the Bible. The type of tree the cross was from is not named. But that doesn't keep the story or legend from making a person look at the blooms and think about Jesus and his sacrifice on the cross. As the George Washington Carver up at the top of this post says, God speaks to us through nature all the time. We just have to tune in.

Had you ever heard the legend of the dogwood?

Do you have dogwood winters where you live?

As always, thanks for reading.

The Breaths of Nature

After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


Every year I love walking to an area on our farm to see some of those miracles of nature. I've already shared a few of the photos I took on my Facebook page. I just took my phone camera because I didn't really plan to go wildflower hunting when I started out. But the day was glorious. It was Easter, but my family had visited the day before and what better day to give yourself the gift of nature than on Easter. Hunting flowers was better than hunting candy filled Easter eggs. At least, for me. I'm sure my grandkids would have disagreed. :)

So, Oscar and I, along with the two little neighbor dogs, took a hike down the cliff. I found flowers alongside the creek bubbling over rocks. The sun glittered off the clear water and rocks. The dogs didn't pay much attention to the flowers, but they did enjoy all the interesting creature smells and dipping into the water for a cool down now and again. I managed not to dip more than my hands and an occasionally clumsy foot into the creek.

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. ~Author Unknown

That's the kind of place this is. Not an easy place to get to, but one that renews my spirit. And I did find flowers. Trilliums, larkspur, bluebells, rue anemone, yellow violets, bellwort, Dutchman's breeches, woods' poppy, squirrel corn, ginger root, Jack-in-a-pulpit, and more. And then I went a little nuts and even took one of those selfies. The creek and me. :) The surprise is that I didn't delete it.

 Every time I get to walk down to the creek or on any of my walks, I feel blessed to still go hiking and to see the gifts of nature that abound all around us. 

You don't have to hike down into wilderness areas to see gifts of nature. They're all around us. The sun shining down through new leaves. Birds singing in the trees. Dandelions making sunspots in the grass. What gifts of nature do you love most?
 
Happiness flutters in the air whilst we rest among the breaths of nature. ~Kelly Sheaffer