City of Hudsonville - Friends of the Nature Center

New Rare Species Found

While on a spring wildflower hike this past May a rare form of Wild Geranium was found. One plant of the white colored form Geranium maculatum form albiflorum was found within eyesight of the trails. The white colored native geranium is listed in Gray’s Manual of Botany and Michigan Flora by Ed Voss as rare and is not listed at all in many other references.

Autumn in the Nature Center

Webster defines “autumn” as “the season between summer and winter” or “a period of maturity”. Both of these definitions are fitting for the next few months in the out-of-doors of Michigan. As summer transitions to winter, the days grow shorter and cooler, and plants reaching their maturity begin to take a new beauty as the flowers and leaves begin to fade away. Young birds and animals that were birthed this past summer are now foraging on their own as mature adults. This changing of seasons makes for a most wonderful time in the out-of-doors as the trees lay down a glorious

carpet of color on the woodland floor, that is rivaled only by those heralders of spring that have long since faded from our view. Those leaves beneath your feet add a unique aroma to the air and quiet your footsteps as they color the barren ground. Yes the cooler weather may require more clothes to keep warm as you walk and ponder, but you can ponder in peace from those pesky mosquitoes. Take some time alone to reflect or take a friend and spend some time out side this fall and enjoy this wonderful season.

Species Profile

Flowering Dogwood, Cornus florida gives us a fabulous display in the spring of many years, but its most colorful displays may often times go unnoticed as its bright red berries are displayed with a backdrop of scarlet leaves in the fall. Being a more southern species, it can be found in the southern half of Michigan, south down through the Appalachian and Smoky Mountains to the states along the Gulf of Mexico. A shade tolerant under story species, it is slow growing and long lived and this small tree can be found at the edges or in clearings of many types of our local woodlands.

Usually not very straight, forming a wide spreading, flat-topped crown with its

loose branches pointing, reaching towards the sky, it averages between 16 and 30 feet in height. The thin reddish brown to blackish blocky plate-like bark scales are said to resemble an alligator’s hide. The leaves are opposite on and clustered at the ends of the twigs. The veins run parallel to the leaf margins, they are light green in summer and scarlet in fall. The newer twigs are pale green and often whitish looking from the small whitish hairs on them. The grayish, spherical or onion shaped flower buds are formed in the fall and remain on through the winter. If the winter is very cold and long, many of the buds will freeze and not bloom, but in a spring after a milder winter, the woodlands come alive with the magnificent white floral displays. The flowers can be found around the middle of May, with four large white to pinkish petal like bracts surrounding the small yellow flowers that are clustered together in the center. The fruit in clusters of 3 to 6 turn scarlet red by October and are eaten by several songbirds.

In the past solutions from the Flowering Dogwood were used to treat such illnesses as jaundice, malaria and cholera, and was a Civil War era substitute for quinine.

Each time I see a Flowering Dogwood, I am reminded that my mother always told me that I could recognize a dogwood by its bark.