Garden shrubs – Cornus

The common name for this native plant is Dogwood and it’s a wonderful plant for a beginner, because it will grow in full sun or partial shade, is fully hardy and copes with a heavy or moist soil or even clay. This is because its natural environment is along waterways. There are a range of plants with different coloured stems and sometimes variegated leaves, and the shrub is popular for naturalistic landscape plantings, especially the species with red or yellow winter stems although a variety with lime green winter stems is growing in popularity. In autumn the leaves turn reddish-orange before they drop which they do early in the autumn but this is fine, because the winter stems need to be bare to show their true glory. The small white summer flowers are sometimes followed by white, often blue-tinged fruit.

Having said that it grows anywhere, the quality of light is important when choosing an area for your dogwood if you want the best winter colour. You need to remember that the sun is at a much lower angle in the winter so that choose a spot where the stems will be hit by the evening sun for best results, in addition, for the best winter stem effect, you have to cut the shrubs back hard each spring. The reason for this hard pruning is to encourage as many upright cane-like stems as possible because the new stems have the brightly coloured bark, whilst the older stems are nowhere near as spectacular. The stems will re-grow to four to six feet high each year.

Cornus photograph by ndrwfgg, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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