Here is the view through our kitchen window as spring arrives.

The view is dominated by a Flowering Dogwood tree (Cornus florida) growing just off the back deck. Dogwoods are native trees and are genuine harbingers of spring.

The individual Dogwood “flower”, as shown in the photograph above, turns out to be a bit more complicated than one would think at first glance. The four large white “petals” are actually modified leaves; botanists would call them “bracts”. They surround a group of tiny flowers which appears as a yellow fuzzy clump at this magnification.

There is an ancient tradition in many cultures to ascribe some religious significance to plants. In searching for some such symbolism in Dogwood “flowers”, it was noticed that there are two longer bracts and two shorter bracts (the longer ones are vertically oriented in the photograph above). These white bracts were thought to form a pattern symbolic of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The group of flowers in the center was thought to represent the crown of thorns on Jesus’s head when he was crucified, and the conspicuous notches at the ends of each bract to represent the four nails that were used to nail Jesus to the cross. The Dogwood tree itself was proposed to have its present small and often twisted stature because it was the wood used to construct the cross, and thus it was cursed by Jesus. This legend loses a bit of its power however, because the Dogwood does not grow in the appropriate area of the Middle East and could not have been used in any cross-making.