Human Flower Project
Dogwood: Pink and White and Wow
Carolyn Courtney, native of Louisville, Kentucky, returns to her old neighborhood to revel in this spring’s show of dogwoods. Near the corner of Basswood and Club lanes in Rolling Fields, a subdivision developed in the early 1950s, are nearly a dozen bi-colored dogwood trees that have been stopping traffic for decades. We don’t know the name of the arborist(s) who produced these ethereal feats. But on the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden’s fine forums we learned how to achieve this magic effect, written by Trevor, of Virginia.
An excerpt: “Pink dogwoods can only be propagated by grafting. That’s when you take a cutting (scion) from the plant you want to re-produce and ‘attach’ it to the root stock of some other plant. (The lower end of the scion is trimmed into a wedge, the root stock is cut off about a foot above the roots and sliced vertically, and the scion is inserted into this slice, with cambian layers aligned). When grafting pink dogwoods, white dogwoods are commonly used for rootstock, since they, unlike pinks, easily reproduce from seed, and are found growing wild all over the place.... You end up with a dogwood that is part pink and part white. If you prune it carefully, you can make both parts roughly equal, so it’s half white and half pink.”
Photo: Human Flower Project