Pink Dogwoods are among America's favorite flowering trees. Pink Dogwood trees have flowers that are rose-pink, suffused with bright red appearing before the leaves, beautiful bright red berries and excellent fall color.The pink objects aren't petals. The petals will be visible in the tiny flowers in the center, when these flowers open. The pink objects are bracts, modified leaves.
Flowering dogwood is a small deciduous tree growing to 10 m (33 ft) high, often wider than it is tall when mature, with a trunk diameter of up to 30 cm (1 ft). A 10-year-old tree will stand about 5 m (16 ft) tall. The leaves are opposite, simple, oval with acute tips, 6–13 cm long and 4–6 cm broad, with an apparently entire margin (actually very finely toothed, under a lens); they turn a rich red-brown in fall.
The flowers are individually small and inconspicuous, with four greenish-yellow petals 4 mm long. Around 20 flowers are produced in a dense, rounded, umbel-shaped inflorescence, or flower-head, 1–2 cm in diameter. The flower-head is surrounded by four conspicuous large white, pink or red "petals" (actually bracts), each bract 3 cm long and 2.5 cm broad, rounded, and often with a distinct notch at the apex. The flowers are bisexual.While most of the wild trees have white bracts, some selected cultivars of this tree also have pink bracts, some even almost a true red. They typically flower in early April in the southern part of their range, to late April or early May in northern and high altitude areas. The similar Kousa Dogwood (Cornus kousa), native to Asia, flowers about a month later.The fruit is a cluster of two to ten drupes, each 10–15 mm long and about 8 mm wide, which ripen in the late summer and the early fall to a bright red, or occasionally yellow with a rosy blush.
Other old names now rarely used include American Dogwood, Florida Dogwood, Indian Arrowwood, Cornelian Tree, White Cornel, False Box, and False Boxwood. This species has in the past been used in the production of inks, scarlet dyes, and as a quinine substitute. The hard, dense wood has been used for products such as golf club heads, mallets, wooden rake teeth, tool handles, jeweler’s boxes and butcher’s blocks.
Il Cornus florida rubra è un piccolo albero dalla straordinaria fioritura rosa acceso. Foglie rosse in autunno. Dimensioni: altezza e larghezza circa 5 metri.Ha bellissime foglie larghe, che in autunno assumono un fantastico colore rosso scarlatto. A maggio si copre di fiori (in realtà brattee) di colore bianco, che si trasformano poi in allegre bacche colorate. Nella varietà "Rubra", la fioritura si presenta in splendide tonalità di rosa e rosso.I veri fiori sono quelli gialli al centro.
Questo Cornus è un albero caduco originario del Nord America. Ha crescita lenta e si presenta come un alberello di taglia medio-piccola, con tronco abbastanza corto e chioma tondeggiante, ampia e molto ramificata; gli esemplari di molti anni possono raggiungere i 10 m di altezza. Le foglie sono verde brillante, cuoriformi, divengono rosse con l'arrivo dei freddi, prima di cadere. In primavera, contemporaneamente alle foglie, produce vistose infiorescenze, costituite da un piccolo mazzetto di fiorellini bianchi alla base del quale spiccano grandi brattee tondeggianti, di colore rosa o bianco, rosse nella varietà Atropurpurea; le infiorescenze rimangono a lungo sulla pianta, e vengono seguite da piccole capsule rossastre contenenti i semi.
