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| Photo Credit: Gernald Klingaman |
| Cornelian cherry blooms before most other plants in spring. |
Not all dogwoods are alike. One species, Cornus mas (Cornelian cherry), actually has yellow flowers and doesn’t much look like the familiar dogwood of the eastern woodlands. But this small tree is tough and long-lived and suitable for any landscape location where you want something to stand out and shine as winter makes its last assault and we eagerly anticipate spring.
Cornelian cherry grows as a small, low-branched, multi-trunked tree reaching 20 feet tall with a like spread. Its bark is a peeling, gray-brown, creating an appealing wintertime display. The leaves are like our native dogwood in shape, but they’re a bit smaller and prone to be cupped. Fall color is usually modest. | Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: Gerald Klingaman | | Cornelian cherry blooms before most other plants in spring. |
The showy portion of our native dogwood is a modified leaf – called a bract – with the true flowers clustered in the center. Cornelian cherry lacks this showy bract. It retains a yellowish set of bud scales, but the display is mainly from the dense cluster of yellow flowers. (These individual blooms are small, but their cluster forms are as large as a nickel.) They’re one of the earliest tree flowers to bloom in spring, making their appearance about two weeks before early deciduous magnolias. And because it’s so cool in February, these flowers remain attractive for about three weeks! Lacking competition, they always make a nice display in the drab, late winter landscape.
The tree’s fruit is a bright red, oblong, cherry-shaped drupe about 3/4 of an inch long and contains a single seed. Though edible, you’ve got to be pretty hungry (or a bird) to properly appreciate this fruit’s insipid flavor.
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