Can You Give Me a Description of a Dogwood Tree?

Size and Form

• The majority of flowering dogwoods grow to between 15 and 30 feet tall. Dogwoods frequently are as wide as they are tall. The tree has a rounded to flat crown of branches. Multiple trunks are common among the dogwood, with the trunks short and the limbs often developing quite close to ground level. The tree thrives in damp, slightly acidic soil in full sun; placing one in a dry, rocky or alkaline site will result in a stunted version.

Dogwood Leaves

• Dogwood leaves grow opposite one another on the twigs, reaching lengths between 3 and 6 inches and widths between 1 1/2 and 3 inches. The oval leaves are medium shades of green, but by autumn, the foliage starts to turn deep red to purple. The leaves turn color early, notes the University of Connecticut Plant Database, with the foliage remaining on the tree well into the season. During a particularly dry summer, the leaves usually start to show signs of curling up along their edges.

Dogwood Flowers and Bracts

• Nature provides extra incentive for insects and other creatures to pollinate the dogwood's inconspicuous, small greenish-yellow flowers. Around each flower is a set of four bracts, modified leaves often assumed incorrectly by people to be flower petals, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. These large bracts, possessing a notched tip, are white on the wild flowering dogwood, but cultivars such as "Cherokee Brave" feature deep pink bracts. Dogwood flowers open in May before the foliage emerges, with the bracts attracting a crowd of bugs to the flowers.

Other Characteristics of Dogwood

• Once the pollinated flowers of a dogwood begin to wane, small greenish berries develop from them. By autumn, the green color turns to brilliant red hues, noticed by birds, who swoop in and eat the fruits. Any berries the birds ignore stay on the dogwood after its leaves fall away, giving it some color for winter. Dogwood's bark varies between gray, blackish and brown, resembling the hide of an alligator. Broken into rectangular blocks, the bark is attractive and it protects an extremely hard red-brown wood that, according to the Missouri Botanical Garden, can be used, for example, for tool handles.