Fast Facts About Dogwood Flowers
The flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), a popular landscaping tree, is prized for its showy spring flowers as well as its red fall foliage. Dogwood trees grow and bloom over most of the eastern half of the United States and along the Pacific Coast in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5 through 9. Under ideal conditions, the trees can reach a height of around 30 feet, with multilayered branches that can spread out to about 20 feet.
Not Really Petals
The four showy dogwood flower petals aren’t actually petals as botanists define them. The dogwood petals instead are modified leaves called bracts that surround a cluster of about 20 tiny yellow flowers. As the flowers bloom, the showy bracts expand to attract pollinating insects. Each bract has a dark red-brown indentation at its tip. Depending on location, dogwood trees may bloom in March, April or May for about two weeks. When pollinated, the flowers produce red berries relished by wildlife.
The dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina and Virginia. The dogwood, daisy and flame azalea were all considered for North Carolina’s official flower in the late 1930s, but the state legislature ultimately chose the dogwood, passing a bill designating it as the official state flower in March 1941. Virginia designated the dogwood as its state flower in 1918. Thomas Jefferson planted dogwoods on his Monticello estate in the 1770s, and the state legislature hoped naming the dogwood as the official state flower would stimulate interest in the state’s history and traditions.
Wild dogwood flowers are mostly white, but wild pink varieties grow as well. The first wild pink dogwoods were recorded in Virginia in 1731. Plant breeders have developed cultivated varieties with bright pink and red flower colors. Regardless of color, all flowering dogwoods can be identified in winter by the large flattened flower buds at the tips of the twigs that arise from the end of each branchlet.
A Christian legend associated with dogwood flowers is that they are shaped like the cross on which Jesus was crucified as a reminder of Christ’s suffering and resurrection. According to the University of Tennessee, the legend holds that the red-brown indentations on the flowers’ petal tips symbolize the nail marks of the crucifixion. The legend says dogwoods once grew tall and straight, but after a dogwood was used to make Jesus’ cross, the trees forever after grew short and crooked.
Herb Kirchhoff has more than three decades of hands-on experience as an avid garden hobbyist and home handyman. Since retiring from the news business in 2008, Kirchhoff takes care of a 12-acre rural Michigan lakefront property and applies his experience to his vegetable and flower gardens and home repair and renovation projects.