This tree near my children's school suddenly produced these gorgeous flowers about three weeks ago. Since I don't know anything about flowers, I had no idea what kind of tree this was. But the flowers are so beautiful and so long lasting that I get more curious about the tree every time I walk past. Most of the tree guides I've seen online have you use the leaves or the fruit to identify a tree. When I tried to id this one (at What Tree is It? of course!) based on its flowers, I came up with dogwood.
But I thought that dogwood flowers had to look like this:
Four petals with notched, burnt-looking tips. Right? I swear I learned this when I was a kid. This tree's flowers do look very similar with their four petals and green centers, but there are no notched tips. Then I remembered the dogwood we saw at the arboretum yesterday. It didn't have notched little tips on its flowers either. They were all perfectly pointy.
That was a Kousa Dogwood. I wonder if this one is too? Hmmm...
