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Dogwood Genus (Cornus)

Dogwood is a genus of flowering plants that consists of 30 to 60 species depending on who is counting. Most are deciduous trees and shrubs, but some are perennial subshrubs, and some are evergreens. The photo below is a red-twig dogwood (Cornus sericea), a shrub native to Canada and many northern U.S. states. Some of its common names are red osier and red-osier dogwood.

It has clusters of small white blossoms, each of which is less than ½ an inch across.

Japanese Dogwood

When most people think of dogwoods, they think of trees. One of the dogwood tree species is native to Korea, China, and Japan. Cornus kousa has several common names including kousa, kousa dogwood, Chinese dogwood, Korean dogwood, and Japanese dogwood.

Japanese dogwood blossoms have a distinct appearance, however looks can be deceiving.

Those large, mostly white petal-like objects are really bracts, not petals or sepals. Bracts are specialized types of leaves. The blossoms are actually the individual nodes of the small ball-like clusters at the center. When they first appear, they are roughly 1 inch in diameter. By the end of summer, the ones that haven't fallen grow to become berries a little larger than 1½ in diameter.

The fruit is edible, though the rind is bitter. Once past that, the flavor is said to be sweet and creamy, similar to a persimmon. There is a hard seed inside.

Flowering Dogwood

My painting subject this week is a different dogwood tree, Cornus florida, often called the flowering dogwood, though dogwoods in general are flowering plants. It is a North America native plant.

Some sources say that it also grows in portions of Canada and down into Mexico.

Like all deciduous trees, it is bare in the winter.

The blossoms come out before the leaves do in the early to mid-spring.

Like the Japanese dogwood, there are four white bracts surrounding the true blossom at the center. Unlike the Japanese dogwood, the bracts are rounded and dimpled at the outer-most rim instead of being pointed. There is also some coloration.

With all the blossoms open, the Cornus florida is quite spectacular.

The trees grow up to 25 feet tall and 15 feet wide. The leaves appear in the late spring.

By the fall, the white bracts have fallen away, but the leaves turn a bright red.

If you look closely, you can see the bright red fruit of the Cornus florida. 

Though they are not poisonous, humans find the fruit almost unpalatable when eaten raw. The pulp when cooked with other fruit is sometimes made into jellies and jams. 

In the winter with all of its foliage gone, the bark of fully mature Cornus florida trees has a very distinctive appearance, leading to the expression that you can always tell a dogwood by its bark.

Utagawa Kunisada (1786 – 1865)

In his own time, Kunisada was the most popular ukiyo-e artist in Japan. He began as a book illustrator where his extraordinary talent was soon recognized. The majority of his ukiyo-e were kabuki and actor prints, but he also produced many sumo, bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful people), and kachō-ga (pictures of birds and flowers) prints. The print below is titled Hanamizuki from the series The Twelve Months (1847-52).