Landscape

THE DOGWOOD

FOUR SEASONS OF CHARM

By Pat Raven, Ph.D., with Julie Hess

Building seasonal color remains essential to creating interest in your garden yearround, with one popular genus of trees and shrubs to fill that bill being Cornus, also known as the dogwood group.

The group’s color calendar locally starts in March with the earliest spring glow of the brilliant golden yellow cornelian cherry, Cornus mas. As a sure sign of spring, it blooms alongside snowdrops and daffodils.

The native dogwood – Cornus florida, the state tree of Missouri – follows next with many varieties in shades of white, cream, rose and red. After that, the Asian kousa dogwoods carry the genus into late spring with their starry-pointed bract blossoms that hold for several weeks.

Stellar Pink and Constellation, from the Rutgers breeding program, constitute hybrids between the native dogwood and the Asian kousa. This collection of trees has large, showy bracts; all the rest have tiny, true flowers in decorative clusters.

Pagoda dogwood, a large maturing native, looks spectacular in late spring with layer-cake branches iced with tiny ivory flowers. The smaller native dogwoods (silky, gray and rough-leaved) nicely fill spaces along the edge of woods or as woody prairie accents with their dainty white-tocream flower clusters.

After flowering, all dogwoods set fruits that birds love. Shiny red drupes ripen in autumn on the traditional dogwood, with soft strawberry-like fruits maturing on the Asian dogwood. The other natives have smoky blue, purple or white fruits. Each adds interest to the fall display, and all ably feed migratory flocks.

Most dogwoods earn acclaim for their brilliant scarlet foliage in the fall. Cornus obliqua, or Red Rover, is a newer selection of the swamp dogwood and is slightly more compact, with purple to red fall color.

Winter interest comes in the form of decorative bark and interesting branch layers. The tree forms are mostly gray, with some reddish twigs. For winter, though, the showstopper dogwoods are the thickets of redtwig and yellowtwig dogwoods. The low-growing Cornus sericea, or Cardinal, has lovely scarlet stems, and Flaviramea is an awardwinning golden twig variety. C. stolonifera, or Arctic Fire, is the smallest and the brightest red. C. sanguinea, or Midwinter Fire, and Arctic Sun rank as the best of both worlds, with yellow stem bases and rich coral twigs.

All of these shrubs are grown for their colorful stems. They perform best when pruned hard, typically a third of the stems each year, which allows the ability to cut them to use in winter urns and containers as a stunning seasonal accent. Choose the oldest and tallest branches to clip for best form the following year. Plant them where you can see them from the window on cold, snowy days.