Mermaid tales

One crooked tree

The Amercican dogwood tree or the flowering dogwood tree (Cornus florida) experienced a near extinction in the 1970s when the wild population was attacked by Dogwood Anthracnose, a disease caused by the fungus Discula destructiva, a

non-native fungus some surmise arrived with the Asian Kousa dogwood, a tree I love and one that grows spectacularly on the Vineyard, but Cornus florida is my first love--she being the tree of my Virginia childhood.

Dogwood Anthracnose killed nearly 90 percent of the wild dogwood population all across the southern, eastern, and western United States. A professor of Entomology and Plant Pathology from the University of Tennessee, Mark Windham, had heard that there were a few surviving dogwoods in the Catoctin mountains near the Presidential Retreat, Camp David in Maryland. So, in 1990, he pilgrimed there, hiked through the mountains past thousands of dead dogwoods. In her 2025 article entitled: "How the resiliency of one crooked flowering dogwood helped to rescue the beloved species," Hayden Dunbar Evans of the Knoxville News Sentinel says that the bent tree Windham found had only 24 blooms.

Windham brought colleagues back to the tree and they took cuttings. The tiny, wild, inspiring tree and her descendants proved to be resistant to the disease. The cultivar she birthed from her cuttings became Appalachian Spring, the cultivar of the two dogwoods that grow outside our windows, blooming like angels in the spring. In this age where power rules, how beautiful is the image of that humble tree blooming alone in the mountainous woods, reaching for the sun through the forest canopy to save our dogwood population.