Dogwood Photograph by CarolLMiller Photography

Dogwood

by CarolLMiller Photography

Canvas Print

$66

Framed Print

$75

Art Print

$20

Poster

$20

Metal Print

$72

Acrylic Print

$80

Wood Print

$52

Greeting Card

$5.95

iPhone Case

$27

Title

Dogwood

Artist

CarolLMiller Photography

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Dogwood by CarolLMiller Photography

A flowering dogwood in spring about to bloom.

Cornus florida (flowering dogwood) is a species of flowering plant in the family Cornaceae native to eastern North America, from southern Maine west to southern Ontario, Illinois, and eastern Kansas, and south to northern Florida and eastern Texas, with a disjunctive population in Nuevo Lend Veracruz in eastern Mexico. In Ontario, this tree species has been assessed and is now listed as endangered.

Flowering dogwood is a small deciduous tree growing to 10 m (33 ft) high, often wider than it is tall when mature, 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, ovate, 613 cm (2.45.1 in) long and 46 cm (1.62.4 in) broad, with an apparently entire margin (actually very finely toothed, under a lens); they turn a rich red-brown in fall.

The flowers are individually small and inconspicuous, with four greenish-yellow bracts 4 mm (0.16 in) long. Around 20 flowers are produced in a dense, rounded, umbel-shaped inflorescence, or flower-head, 12 cm (0.390.79 in) in diameter. The flower-head is surrounded by four conspicuous large white, pink or red "petals" (actually bracts), each bract 3 cm (1.2 in) long and 2.5 cm (0.98 in) broad, rounded, and often with a distinct notch at the apex. The flowers are bisexual.

When in the wild they can typically be found at the forest edge and popular on dry ridges. 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 1015 mm (0.390.59 in) long and about 8 mm (0.31 in) 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. [1]

I photographed this Arkansas flowering dogwood in the spring of 2014 after a particularly hard winterso happy to see new life springing forth!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornus_florida

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Third Place - Spring Is On Its Way Contest - January 2014

Second Place - Best of Fine Art America Group Spring Logo Contest - April 2015