By Rachel d’Entremont
I moved to Aiken in 1979 and we bought an old house downtown.
Three of my breakfast room’s six windows are on the east side of the house where they catch the morning sun (welcome in the winter but definitely not to a Syracuse girl in the hot and sunny south in July and August). So the summer after moving into our home, we decided to plant a tree to provide morning shade. If we hadn’t, we probably wouldn’t, for a long time, have discovered that a grave was outside of those east-facing windows. The granite marker was buried under many years’ worth of plant debris and only the clank of the shovel alerted us to its presence. It is a plain marker with the name “Ring” and the years 1932-1949. Because the long-ago family thought enough of him to bury him adjacent to the house, from the day of our discovery, I made sure that the gravestone was kept clean and that it didn’t get buried again.
We chose a new location about a foot from our original spot for our tiny tree and began digging.
We knew nothing about tree planting and I, being from Central New York State, had no idea that Southern trees should be planted in the fall or winter, not in the heat of the summer. Nor did we know anything about choosing a quality tree, choosing the right tree for the site conditions, site preparation, or tree care. We wanted shade so we planted a tree: a Dogwood.
Well, that cheap little Dogwood from Lowes didn’t stay little for long. It started out at not even an inch DBH and maybe 5 feet tall and within not too many years its highest branches were approaching the peak of our two-story house. Planted in full sunlight, never fertilized, it grew and grew. Five years after we planted the tree, we planted another tiny Dogwood under much kinder conditions and in a much better, lightly shaded spot.
When our first dogwood reached 36 years old, it had a 9-inch DBH, and shaded the patio, driveway, and breakfast room; the tree planted five years later was still under 5-inch DBH with its branches reaching only slightly above the eaves of the house. The first tree’s growth rate had slowed and nature did a little “crown reduction” during the 2014 ice storm, but the tree was still an impressive size compared to the much older Dogwoods in the yard and in our neighborhood.
The most impressive thing about this tree though was the size of its blossoms. For years, every time my dad visited in the spring, he would take photos of the blossoms because he had never seen any so large; most years they reached the size of a 6-inch bread-and-butter plate. They were so large they were floppy!
Unfortunately, the ice storm and other weather events eventually took their toll; in the spring of 2016 not a single blossom or leaf appeared and we discovered our beloved Dogwood had expired.
After many years of people remarking on the size of the blossoms and the rate of growth, it dawned on me…Dogwoods seem to thrive on organic fertilizers such as bone meal and blood meal, and as you may have guessed, Ring, buried long ago in that spot, was a dog!
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