Saturday, I went for a short afternoon loop hike at Palomar Mountain with my friend Tracy. The route took us along the Silvercrest Trail into the forest, where the Mountain Dogwood (Cornus nuttallii) is in bloom again.
This is a quite reliable bloom each year in early May, but with the lack of rain, the rest of the forest doesn’t look so beautiful this year, unfortunately: open stretches of trail and meadows that are normally filled with ferns are bare and dry, and there’s not a lot of wildflowers to be found either.
Nevertheless, these astonishingly large blooms enchant the forest, and it’s wonderful to see them again — even though none of the photos offers anything new or different from the ones I already have, from 2019, of course. ;)
Besides the joy of seeing them, it’s fun to photograph the dogwoods and then develop them for impact — the photos don’t really do the whole experience justice. Because there’s nothing quite like standing in silence in the woods and watching these big white floral puffs gently sway in the wind, complemented with an ambience of small creeks murmuring, and bird calls echoing between the trees…
I was also there about a week ago and saw a few of the dogwoods, but I didn’t capture any of them in photos.
Beautiful
I do love seeing the dogwood bloom each year. This past weekend I was realizing now that the dogwood here have finished blooming I’m not longer able to easily identify the dogwood trees from any other in the forest. I need to begin learning to ID trees from their other features like bark and leaves. Thanks for sharing these. Dogwood is something I love seeing but often struggle to photograph.