Last year for my birthday, my husband John planned a lovely get away to St Ives. Along with an overnight stay at the sweet little B&B below, he surprised me with a stop along the way to buy a Dogwood tree for my birthday because he remembered that I had talked about missing the Dogwoods that bloomed in my Atlanta neighborhood every spring.

This is what my Dogwood looked like when we got it last September. It seems to have made it through the winter snows we had here and has even begin to put out tiny new leaves as you can see below.

We would be seeing an explosion of color by now if we were in Georgia, but the Dogwoods here will not reach their flowering peak until much later. It was early June last year when I realized that Dogwood trees grew in England. They were in full bloom then which is long after you would see their flowery bits in Atlanta.

When we brought it home last September, there as a small piece about 4 inches long that broke off in the car. John slipped it into a small vase of water and put it in the kitchen window where it sat looking like a dead stick for the last five months. I almost tossed it a couple of times, but since John has the green thumb, I deferred to him and left it there.

A few weeks ago I considered dumping it again. It looked so dead that I wondered why he was keeping it. So I took it out of its watery grave and sniped off the end. I gave it a fresh bit of water like John had been doing for months and stuck in back on the window ledge. After all this time, I did not expect much. In fact, I thought we would be tossing it into the compost bucket soon, but today I gave it a passing glance like I have all winter and guess what I saw.

The top looks the same as it has all winter, but hello, what is that I see inside the glass.

It’s new life … welcome back my little Dogwood.