Dogwoods—specifically Cornus florida, the native with 4 showy bracts, differentiable from kousa by its beautiful terminal notches—is one of my very favourite flowering trees, equaled, perhaps, only by some cultivars of plum/cherry/crabapple (the two former in Japan, the latter being what I see locally) all of which are members of the rose family. Plum and cherry are technically in the Prunus genus,^[1] whereas crabapples are (unsurprisingly) members of Malus (apple).

dogwood flowers; sony A7c, tamron 70–180mm telephoto, 180mm, f/2.8, ev -0.3, 1/1250s, ISO 100, approx 07:00 am, 10may2026; cropped and scaled

All three have the habit of blooming before leafing out, meaning the flowers stand out beautifully from the branches; and dogwoods in particular have a very beautiful branching form that I especially like. Their flowers (& bracts) relatively straightforward to draw, though I'm still learning how to depict them on branches. The above photo, however, emphasizes the flowers, framed by bokeh; this image is somewhat unusual in that I used my telephoto, instead of my macro lens, resulting in the fore and aft blur framing:)

dogwood branch: sony A7c, 90mm macro, f/2.8, 1/4000s, ev -0.7, ISO 100; lightened using curves tool, and also the exposure tool; cropped and scaled

And here's a bonus shot, which does show the branching pattern. As you can see from the camera notes, I originally shot it 2/3 of a stop underexposed to retain the beautiful sky; then tried a new filter in gimp, the ‘exposure’ tool, in addition to my fave (curves) to attempt lightening the subject while retaining some of the background colour.

It's not gonna win awards for post-processing, but at least there aren't weird halos around everything!

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.