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According to Britton and Brown's "Illustrated Flora" it is glabrous or pubescent, with several or many stems, ascending or nearly erect; with green or red leaves, which are wonderfully variable in outline, from linear to orbicular, mostly opposite, the upper sometimes whorled, the lower often alternate. The glands of the involucres are elliptic or oblong, and even the seeds vary in shape.
In April, plant-life, as a whole, reached its greatest height, and the plain, over all its varied surface, was mantled with a close, furred plush of purple and golden corollas. By the end of this month, most of the species had ripened their seeds, but undecayed, still seemed to be in bloom from the numerous corolla-like involucres and whorls of chaffy scales of the composite.
There are three or four with a cup-shaped involucre, and three with spinous involucres enclosing an eatable sweet nut; these generally grow on a dry clayey soil. Some low steep spurs were well cultivated, though the angle of the field was upwards of 25 degrees; the crops, chiefly maize, were just sprouting.
For instance, it seems as if no woman could habitually walk uninjured with a weight of twelve pounds of skirts suspended at her hips, Dr. Coale is responsible for the statistics, and as if salvation must therefore lie in shoulder-straps. Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a dozen successive involucres of flannel.
Nuttall's flowering dogwood makes a brave display with its wealth of show involucres in the spring along cool streams. Specimens of the flowers may be found measuring eight inches in diameter. It makes valuable lumber and its black, astringent fruit furnishes a rich resource as food for the birds.
I may also mention a large mertensia, a fine anemone, a veratrum, six feet high, a large blue daisy, growing up to three to four thousand feet, and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky, hairy involucres, and a few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock cheilanthes, leaving scarce a foot of ground bare, though the mountain looks bald and brown in the distance like those of the desert ranges of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada.
It is very available for household decoration, with its four great creamy petals, flowers they are not, but floral involucres, each with a fantastic curl and stain at its tip, as if the fireflies had alighted on them and scorched them; and yet I like it best as it peers out in barbaric splendor from the delicate green of young Maples.
Some of the involucres of the flowering dogwood measure six to eight inches in diameter, and the whole tree when in flower looks as if covered with snow. In the spring when the streams are in flood it is the whitest of trees. In Indian summer the leaves become bright crimson, making a still grander show than the flowers.
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