COMPLIMENTARY 
NEW SERIES VOL X 
NO. II 
ARNOLD ARBORETUM 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
BULLETIN 
OF 
POPULAR INFORMATION 
JAMAICA PLAIN, MASS. JULY 7. 1924 
Cornus kousa. This is the Asiatic representative of the Flowering 
Dogwood of the eastern states {Cornus Jlorida) and of the Flowering 
Dogwood of the Northwest {Cornus Nuttallii). C. kousa was one of 
the Japanese plants which reached the United States in the early years 
of Japanese plant introduction into this country, and although it has 
never become common in American gardens it is occasionally seen in 
those of Boston and New York. The white bracts which surround the 
head of flowers and are a conspicuous feature of all the Cornels of 
this group are narrowed and placed further apart on C. kousa than on 
the eastern Flowering Dogwood, and are long-pointed and not, as in 
the American plant, rounded or emarginate at the apex. On the Amer- 
ican plant the end of the bract is often discolored, while in the Asiatic 
plant the bracts are pure white to the tips. The flower-buds of C. flor~ 
ida are often killed in Massachusetts in severe winters but the extreme 
cold of recent years has not injured those of C. kousa. The Japanese 
plants bloom several weeks later than C. florida and when the leaves 
are nearly fully grown. In Japan it sometimes becomes a small tree 
with a single trunk; in this country, so far as we have observed, it 
grows always as a shrub with several erect stems. In central China 
Cornus kousa was found by Wilson, and a plant from his Chinese seed 
is well established among the Chinese plants on the southern slope of 
Bussey Hill where it is now a shrub about twelve feet high with numerous 
erect stems. It is handsomer than any of the Japanese forms with 
longer and broader floral bracts often overlapping below the middle. 
In the Arboretum the head of bracts is sometimes four and a half 
inches broad and in China Wilson measured them five inches across. 
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