PAGODA DOGWOOD IS BLOOMING

ALTERNATE BRANCHING HABIT OF PAGODA DOGWOOD

PAGODA DOGWOOD FLOWER UMBELS

Thursday, 8:30 AM.  51 degrees F at the ferry dock and on the back porch.  Wind N, calm at present.  The sky is partly cloudy, the humidity 93%.  The barometer is dropping gently, now at 29.73", predicting rain and cooler weather for the weekend and into the next week.  Today and tomorrow should be nice, with highs in the mid-seventies.
   The pagoda dogwood, Cornus alternifolia, in the Dogwood Family, is blooming now.  It is an unusual shrub in the landscape, its strongly alternate  branching habit giving it a rather distinctive Oriental appearance.  It is also the only species of Cornus that has alternate leaves and branches.    Native to deciduous and mixed woodlands of eastern North America but rare in the South, it is quite beautiful in the landscape but I find it finicky to transplant and establish, and it has a tendency to develop a branch blight that can be disfiguring, if not fatal.  Use it, but with the anticipation that it may be problematic.

OFF THE CUFF

Defining the Term "Resistance"

   Our neighboring community to the south, Washburn, Wisconsin, is an ultra-liberal community that often stages political protests that I find upsetting, and has political signs that I consider over-the-top and distasteful, but that's  all their right to do so.  

   However, in the wake of the shooting of Republican congressmen and staffers in Washington yesterday, I became incensed enough to complain to the City Administrator and the Chamber of Commerce that I no longer felt welcome in their community and would no longer shop there until some signs came down (we spend at least $6,000 a year at the IGA and several restaurants).  I got a big run around and I am sure things will not change, but so be it.

   One home owner, right on Hwy. 13, has continually erected vile effigies of the Governor and the President, although they have recently been replaced by a very prominent sign that says "Resist".

   Nothing wrong with that? I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It equates resistance to fictional misdeeds and political policies with the resistance movements in Europe by patriots willing to die in their opposition to the Nazis during WWII.  

   When I was in High School in the early 50's, after the war, I became friends with a boy who had recently immigrated from Austria.  His family had been a member of the resistance, at great peril to their lives.  His father, a rather meek little man with thick glasses, had constructed a short wave radio with which he informed the Allies of German troop movements in the mountains on the Swiss border in the Ost Tyrol.  They hid the radio in the hayloft of their barn.  The Germans often came looking for it.  Had they found it, the whole family would have been summarily shot,  

   That was "resistance."  What the left now calls resistance is only childish, but very damaging, obstructionism.   Quite unsettling, after seeing our congressional representatives lie bleeding, of all places, on a baseball field.  

   Let's take down the signs, and reduce the rhetoric.