Dogwood, Mexican Flowering

The Mexican flowering dogwood is a small deciduous tree growing to 10m (33 ft) high, with a crown often wider than tree height when mature, and 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 Mexican flowering dogwood generates a lot of interest from those lucky enough to see it in flower. Its unusual FLOWERS are quite different from those on the common eastern dogwood. The white, petal-like bracts are narrow, creased, and joined at the top, which prevents the flowers from opening completely. The flowers appear like small “Chinese lanterns” at the branch tips. Hardy to USDA Zones 6 – 7, this dogwood also holds its foliage much longer than the average native dogwood, prolonging its fall color display. It has resistance to leaf diseases that commonly affect other forms of eastern dogwoods. Structurally, its FORM is somewhat taller and narrower than the eastern dogwood’s.

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. They are an important food source for dozens of species of birds, which then distribute the seeds.