13 of the Best Flowering Dogwood Varieties

23.02.2024 - 18:55 / gardenerspath.com / Joe Butler

13 of the Best Flowering Dogwood Varieties

Arguably the crown jewel of the Cornus genus, the flowering dogwood (C. florida) offers plenty of beauty in standard species mode, no cultivars required.

But for even more ornamental options, why not check out some cultivated C. florida varieties?

With over a hundred cultivars of flowering dogwood available in various sizes, forms, and colors, a gardener has quite the choice to make.

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Add assorted growth rates, bloom times, and disease resistance to the mix, and that choice becomes even harder.

To help you on this journey, you’ll need a guide. Not necessarily an old, wizened, and sage guide like Gandalf or Yoda, though. I’ll have to do, at least to start.

With this guide to 13 of the best flowering dogwood cultivars, we’ll be separating the wheat from the chaff, the cream from the non-creamy crop, the extraordinary from the extra ordinary.

At least, it reveals what I consider to be the 13 best. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, right?

Here’s the lineup:

Before we begin, it’s important to know the sort of tree you want, along with where you intend on planting it.

And if you need a quick primer on flowering dogwoods and how to grow them, check out our article.

Also, I’ll be using the terms bloom/flower and bract pretty much interchangeably.

Even though they’re modified leaves rather than true flower petals, the leaf bracts of flowering dogwoods pretty much function as flowers, at least ornamentally.

Okay, time to talk trees! And shrubs, if we’re being technical.

Since cultivars are either intentionally bred or