Dogwood

OK, this is going to be a complete nerd-out session on dogwoods, you've been warned.

I'm rather fond of these little flowers that carpet the forest floor. These are dwarf dogwoods (Cornus canadensis) and they're related to BC's official flower which blooms on a tree, pacific dogwood (Cornus nuttallii).

In late summer dwarf dogwoods produce these red fruits, which are the reason for their other name, bunchberry. The berries are edible - they're not the sweetest berry out there, but they have a nice subtle, nutty flavour and I like the crunchiness of the seeds in them.

The centre of this bloom is actually made up of a lot of little flowers. The white "petals" are actually bracts, or modified leaves, turned white to attract pollinators and to act as a landing pad.

Dogwoods are always opposite in their leaf arrangements (vs. alternate - see the drawing below). This means that the dogwood inflorescence will always have an even number of white bracts. The dwarf dogwoods (almost) always have four, but the pacific dogwoods seem to commonly have six.

Every once in awhile though, I spot drawings of dogwoods with five petals, like on the old BC Ferries logo. I guess the artists think it looks more balanced with five. Maples are also always opposite, and whoever designed the Canadian penny got that one wrong too.

This logo, I like. Accurate, pretty and useful. This one comes right off of the Murtle Lake map.

Ok, the whole reason I wanted to talk about dogwoods is because I came across two examples of some very funky ones while at Murtle Lake.

First, I came across three purplish-pink dogwoods. All three were in a small patch together, you can try to spot them in the photo below:

I was pretty darn stoked on discovering pink dogwoods and it prompted an evening nature nerding adventure for our whole group. At this point we read up on dogwoods and discovered that the plant guide describes the bracts as being purplish-tinged to white, meaning that maybe my discovery wasn't that unusual. The guide also states that they have four leafy bracts, not four to six as I had thought, making the next day's discovery even more exciting:

Six bracts!!

The weird thing about this specimen is that it looks to me like two sets of three bracts, rather than three pairs of opposite bracts, which would make this flower even more mutant-ish. So nerdy-cool.