Plant · P-1024

Flowering Dogwood

Cornus florida

Flowering dogwood is a small understorey tree that opens the spring with four broad white or pink bracts wrapped around its true flowers, then turns scarlet in fall as its red berries ripen for the birds. It hosts the spring azure butterfly's caterpillars and draws native bees, and its wood is hard and shock-resistant enough that it once went into golf club heads, tool handles and weaving shuttles. It needs a long, hot, humid summer to thrive and acidic, well-drained soil - it dislikes chalky or shallow clay ground outright - and a late frost can wipe out a whole season's bracts even on a tree that is otherwise perfectly cold-hardy. The fruit is bitter and barely edible raw, and one source even flags it as possibly toxic, so it is a bird crop first and, at most, something to cook into jam rather than eat off the tree.