HAWKWEED, DWARF CORNEL, AND "LEAVING THE NEST"

ORANGE HAWKWEED

A LARGE PATCH OF DWARF CORNEL...

...FLOWERS

Monday, 7:30 AM.  50 degrees F, wind ENE, light.  The sky is mostly cloudy but seems to be clearing rapidly, and we do not have the heavy fog of recent mornings.  The humidity is still 96% and the barometer is trending down, now at 29.85".
   Buddy grabbed a baby robin on the ground before I could stop him this morning.  I took it from him but I think it was already dead.  He is, after all, a "bird dog," and cannot be blamed. But I felt a real compassion for the parents as they fussed and protested in the branches above us, and it if I can have that much empathy with robins, how much more will I have for human parents.
   "Leaving the nest" is a time of great peril for the young of any species, and it upsets me more than I can say to see the children, unaccompanied by their parents, flooding across our borders.  They have not left their nest willingly, I am sure, but have been cast out to fend for themselves and ultimately survive or not depending upon luck and our American humanitarian efforts. Many are destined to suffer the same fate as this morning's baby robin, I fear, and we will all suffer along with them.
   Two diminutive flowers are blooming now, one quite common here, the other seldom encountered by most folks.  The former is the orange hawkweed, Hieracium aurantiacum, in the sunflower family.  The orange to yellow flowers grow on about a 6" stalk from a flattened rosette of fuzzy leaves.  It is very pretty.  It can be considered a lawn and garden weed I suppose, but it is really only abundant in nutrient deficient, sandy soil.  There are about a dozen different introduced species, this one common in the north.  The ancient Greeks gave the genus its name as they thought hawks fed on the plants to aid their eyesight, and many of the hawkweeds were used in the Middle Ages for diseases of the lungs, such as whooping cough, and other ailments.
   The latter flower is the dwarf cornel, or dwarf dogwood, Cornus canadensis, a low-growing northern woodland ground cover plant in the dogwood family.  It has a quite beautiful white flower very much like that of the iconic flowering tree of the southern and southeastern U.S., the flowering dogwood, Cornus florida.  Both species bear bright red edible fruits about the size of a cherry, but shaped more like a diminutive football.  The fruit has a quite pleasant but not very sweet taste and should make great jams and jellies.  There are will be enough  fruit in this large patch for me to harvest some if I can get to them before the bears and birds, and I will report further on their edibility.