Kousa Dogwood
Cornus kousa · Trees - Deciduous
Kousa dogwood
New York Botanical Garden, 26 May 2025
What look like four broad pink petals on each flower are bracts - modified leaves - surrounding a tight green-gold cluster of the real, much smaller flowers at the centre.
Kousa dogwood blooms several weeks later than the native flowering dogwood it is often planted alongside, which is why the two rarely overlap in a single garden's calendar. It has also proved resistant to the fungal disease that has killed so many of the native trees, which is why it is planted so much now.
Kousa Dogwood
New York Botanical Garden, 16 May 2021
The four white points are bracts - modified leaves - and the actual flowers are the tight green cluster at the centre, twenty or thirty tiny ones packed into a ball.
That ball becomes the fruit: a red aggregate like a small lychee, edible and rather good. Kousa flowers a few weeks after the American flowering dogwood and after its own leaves are out, which is the quickest way to tell the two apart.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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