Chase the winter blues away with a yellow-flowering Japanese cornel dogwood.
Photo by L.A. Jackson
Imagine a dogwood, and visions of a small tree layered in swaths of white, four-petal flowers on a balmy spring day probably come to mind. But for me, sometimes I feel a chill and see yellow.
No, I don’t need a doctor. Instead, I have memories of being bundled up during the cool days of a waning winter and enjoying an ornamental oddity known as Japanese cornel dogwood.
Unlike the spring-flowering native dogwood (Cornus florida), Japanese cornel dogwood (Cornus officinalis) is a rather impatient pretty, opting to show off its flowers sooner in the nippy air of mid-February into early March.
And the flowers: Close your eyes. Picture branches heavily laced with bright yellow, sprite-like blooms that look like tiny stars bursting. That’s the delightful, unexpected show put on by this dazzler. As a bonus, faded flowers are followed by small, oblong, red fruit that begin to form in early summer and are usually gobbled up by birds as they mature late in the season.
The cornel dogwood is a small, deciduous tree with a semi-open habit. It will usually top out at around 20 feet and about as wide. And although it is from East Asia, this pretty import is winter-hardy throughout the state.
A site that has well-worked, organically enriched soil will help get this special dogwood off to a good start. It loves the sun, but since our region is approaching the southern end of its preferred growing zone, if possible, plant in an area where there is some shady relief during the worst of the summer’s afternoon heat.
And just to muddy up the water a bit, the Japanese cornel dogwood is not a one-off alt-dogwood. Its near-doppelganger is cornelian cherry dogwood (Cornus mas) from southern Europe with similar displays of small, yellow flowers and red berries, although it usually blooms about a week or two later.
You won’t find bunches and bunches of yellow-flowering dogwoods at local nurseries, but they aren’t strangers in plant shops either. Let your fingers do the walking and call garden centers to see if they have any or can order one for you. Spring Glow and Kintoki are two of the easier-to-find cultivars.
Online hunting is, of course, an option, with MrMaple (mrmaple.com) and Wilson Bros Gardens (wilsonbrosgardens.com) being two regional e-nurseries that offer these cool-weather showoffs.
January in the garden
• The beginning of the year is a good time to search seed e-catalogs online for selections that have been dependable for you in the past and even enticing new introductions. Now is not when you plant most annual and perennial seeds, of course, but ordering them early helps assure any picks you make won’t be tagged at checkout by the dreaded “Out of Stock.”
• For watering plants, a garden hose won’t get much of a workout this month, but it can still be useful, especially if you are thinking about adding another bed or two to your landscape. Use its long length and flexibility to create the curves and swerves of a potential outline for the new planting area before any digging is done.
Tip of the month
While you are looking locally for yellow-flowering dogwoods, also check out Lenten roses (Helleborus x hybridus), which should be showing up in garden shops this month, too. These flashy hellebores are cold-hardy wonders that produce clusters of cute, cupped blooms in the ch-ch-ch-chill of late winter and continue flaunting their flowers deep into the new spring. They are evergreen and eventually form 12- to 18-inch-high clumps that not only persist through the hottest months but, if kept happy and healthy, will continue to expand through reseeding. These tough plants even perform well in areas of dry shade and, as a bonus, are deer-resistant.
L.A. Jackson is the former editor of Carolina Gardener magazine. Contact him at lajackson1@gmail.com.