The trees at our new house were planted just days before we moved in, late last July, in the middle of a heat wave. We watered the sod and landscaping three times a day for several weeks, but nevertheless, it appeared that three of our four trees did not survive. The redbud in front looked like it might pull through, but the two sugar maples in front and the dogwood in back lost all their leaves and turned into sticks.
So in the autumn, we asked the builder’s landscaper to replace the dead trees. He replaced the two maples, but he couldn’t find a dogwood, so he said he would replace that in the spring.
Early this year, we asked another landscaper who has done work for us for over twenty years to assess our yard, including the trees. He said the maples planted in the fall and the redbud planted last summer were fine, but the dogwood in back was deadwood. He also said that a dogwood would never grow in full sunshine where our dead tree was. So we contacted our builder and asked him to have his landscaper replace the dogwood with another redbud. Redbuds are hardy and grow anywhere in Missouri, it seems.
Then the pandemic hit. Overnight, businesses closed. No one showed up to replace our dogwood.
After a huge windstorm few weeks ago, I noticed that the dogwood tree in our backyard looked different. I went out to examine it. Up close, it looked deader than from inside the house. A branch or two must have broken off in the wind, I thought—that must be why it looks different.
We wanted the dogwood replaced in the spring, when it would have a better chance of survival than waiting until summer. But given the pandemic, I decided it could wait a few weeks before we contacted the builder’s landscaper again. As long as it was replaced before the heat of summer, I thought we’d be fine.
As March progressed, the redbud in our front yard blossomed. Not extravagantly, but enough to let us know it lived. Now it is leafing out. The same is true of the new sugar maples—little green buds appeared as the temperatures moderated, and now the foliage is big enough to show the multi-tipped shape of maple leaves.
But still nothing on the tree in back. We didn’t expect anything, because dead trees don’t blossom.
Then last week, my husband said to me, “It’s a miracle!”
“What?” I asked. He doesn’t talk much about miracles, so I usually take note when he does.
“It’s blooming!”
“What’s blooming?”
He pointed to the dead dogwood out back. “The dogwood. It’s alive.”
I looked at it. Sure enough, there were pink blossoms on the tree. But they didn’t look like dogwood blossoms to me. They looked like redbud blossoms. Despite the fact that the redbuds in our neighborhood had bloomed two weeks earlier, we now had redbud blooms on what we thought was a dogwood. Though my husband remains convinced that they are dogwood blossoms and the tree was resurrected.
I, on the other hand, believe that the builder’s landscaper did in fact replace our dogwood with a redbud, as we requested, and that the back north side of the house blooms two weeks later than the south side in front. Still, the landscaper must have worked in the dark of night, because with the stay-at-home order in place, we haven’t gone anywhere. And he must have worked neatly, because there were no cart tracks or misplaced mulch around the backyard tree. How we missed the tree’s replacement is the miracle to me.
So is it a dogwood or a redbud? One of us is definitely wrong. But for me, a stealthily replaced tree and our own inattention is easier to accept than resurrection in a dogwood.
When have you been surprised by plants in your yard or garden?
I once asked my husband to plant a lilac bush in the back yard to hide a utility box. He dutifully went to the nursery and brought home something from the lilac section. The next year we had a hardy tree growing where he planted the lilac bush. Hmmm. Either a miracle or someone dropped off a tree in the lilac section at the nursery. Later we had to cut it down because it shaded too much of the back yard and did a poor job hiding the utility box.