Flowering dogwood
Cornus florida
also called eastern dogwood, american dogwood
The white and pink tiers of an American April: the most beloved small flowering tree on the continent, with scarlet fall leaves and glossy red berries the songbirds finish by Thanksgiving.
- Type
- Tree · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- White · Pink
- Sunlight
- Morning sun and afternoon shade, with air moving
- Watering
- Moderate; mulch wide and never nick the trunk
- Soil
- Acidic, humus-rich, moist but drained; a woodland-edge root run
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 5a–9a
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- 14 days before the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 19 ft 8 in
- In-row spacing
- 16 ft 5 in
- Between rows
- 26 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, shallow and far-reaching
- Working depth
- 8–18 in
- Can reach
- 4 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 49–74 ft across, about 2–3× the width of the plant
Almost all of a tree’s roots are in the top two feet of soil, where the air is, and they run out well past the branch tips. The deep taproot most people picture belongs to the seedling; the tree grows out of it and spends the rest of its life spreading sideways instead.
Shallow and fine-rooted, and unhappy with competition, heat or a hoe at the base. Mulch out to the branch tips and it will do everything else itself.
Figures recorded for Flowering dogwood itself. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Not harvested; the red berries are bird food and mildly toxic to people. Prune, minimally, right after bloom.
- What to look for
- A dead twig, a crossing branch, a sucker off the base. If nothing is wrong, keep the saw in the shed.
- How to harvest
- Small cuts just after flowering, sealed by the tree on its own. Maintain a wide mulch ring to the drip line: the dogwood borer enters through mower wounds, so the mulch is pest control, not decoration.
- How often
- Rarely, and lightly; dogwoods heal slowly and resent big wounds.
- Storing the crop
- Nothing to store. The berries go to thrushes, cardinals and mockingbirds inside a month, which was the plan all along.
- Anthracnose Dogwood anthracnose in cool damp shade; sun, airflow and a resistant cultivar are the whole defense
- Powdery mildew Powdery mildew graying the summer leaves
- Dogwood borer entering through mower and trimmer wounds, which is what the wide mulch ring is for
The four white "petals" are bracts; the true flowers are the little green button in the middle. State tree of Missouri and Virginia, and the spring benchmark whole festivals are scheduled around.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com