A tree I did not recognize grows beside our parking area up by the road.

A small tree with spreading branches, mid-spring flowers, and berries that get eaten as soon as they are ripe.

I had tried to identify it a couple times, but the pictures in my tree book shows leaves and bark not flowers.

Now that I know what it is, the written description in the book is a total giveaway, but I never would have looked at the dogwood section. Dogwood is a shrub, not a three-meter-tall tree I assumed.

This year, I decided that as soon as the tree flowered, I would post a picture on Facebook so that that world, sometimes called the “hive mind” would answer my question. Sure enough, I got immediate answers: a pagoda dogwood.

I was immediately alert. Just three days earlier, a woman who is working on encouraging people to grow native plants for pollinators had told me I should get a pagoda dogwood. And here, I already had a mature tree and three younger trees as well. These I identified as they flowered a bit later than the mature tree, which is more in the open.

One of these I almost cut down last year because from the house, it appeared to be dead. When my saw and I went to it, I realized that the crown of the tree had leaves. Just the lower branches where neighbours blocked the light were bare. The tree remains.

Now that I knew what kind of tree it was, I kept an eye on the flowers. Sure enough, a day or two later, the tree was abuzz. Hundreds of small wild bees crawled across the flowers. This was a transformative moment for me.

I have always known bumble bees. I’ve disturbed a nest when standing on a ladder and been stung in the face. I’ve gardened beside them as they go about their business. I have seen small flying insects on flowers and wondered what they were.

Finally, now that I am 64, I learned that these are wild bees not flies. And I have seen these bees up close on my pagoda dogwoods.

The conversation about native plants had been swirling around me for months. I had started to pay attention, but that day, when I saw how a native tree brought so many wild bees, I suddenly understood. I started looking at the wildflowers in my garden differently.

I had been inclined to leave some of the weeds rather than removing all the wildflowers. Now, I had to find the right places to research which were naturalized and which were native. So many came from Europe and adjusted to our climate just fine.

Some of these bumble bees and butterflies like very well. My comfrey for example that I brought from the farm draws lots of the bigger pollinators. The smaller native bees, not so much. I’ve been weeding out the buttercup and leaving the wood mint and wood sorrel. I’ve been pulling up the dandelions as well because I learned that their pollen is protein poor.

When the sumac flowered, I realized that the small wild bees love it almost as much as the pagoda dogwood. I’ve also seen these bees on the ironwood, which is flowering up and down our road prolifically. (This one I had to have identified by the hive-mind a couple years ago; I knew the bark but not the flower.)

Getting rid of the periwinkle is a daunting task but I can keep it from spreading to new areas. I love wild sweet peas too much to pull them all out. So, I am not an absolutist when it comes to the garden.

The perennials that were already here, and the irises and roses that came from our parents’ gardens, will stay because they hold memory.

But what I buy to add into the empty spaces will be native plants, things that evolved with the pollinators that are also native to this land.

The sight of those dogwood flowers crawling with wild bees woke me up.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation.

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