Growing Ornamental Dogwoods For Winter Bark

Ornamental Cornus Varieties in Your Garden Design

These dogwoods are a joy to grow, planted for their brightly coloured young stems that look great in winter. You can plant them in a loose, natural looking clump, or as a decorative hedge.

• Their only demand is that they get most of the day in full sunshine during spring & summer.
• They will grow in any soil type, acid or alkaline.
• Their favourite soil is wet and waterlogged, but they will be fine in dry soil on a hill: you can't go wrong!

If you are planning on planting them in poorly fertile soil, we recommend improving it first with plenty of well rotted manure and/or compost. It is not essential that you do this, but it will ensure that you get a thick shower of bright young shoots each year.

Mixing Different Dogwood Colours

You can plant a single variety and it will look great. For an even more exciting and wild looking dogwood feature, mix up a few different cultivars to get a nice mix of reds, oranges, yellows, and darker colours for contrast

Red / Scarlet / Crimson	Yellow	Purple-Black	Multi-coloured
C. alba Spaethii	C. Flaviramea	C. Kesselringii	C. Midwinter Fire (Red, Orange & Yellow)
C. alba Elegantissima
C. alba Gouchaultii
C. alba Sibirica

The wild dogwoods, Cornus sanguinea & Cornus alba, are also fine for ornamental planting, but their reddish stems are less vivid, so if you do use them they should probably go at the back. 

Spacing: For a decorative dogwood hedge, plant them 2ft / 60cm apart. For a nice wild looking clump, plant them 3ft / 90cm apart.

Hard pruning is necessary for a steady supply of bright young stems.

All you have to do to keep your plants producing lots of new stems is to hard prune - or coppice - them every year from the end of their first year (maybe their second, if you feel that they struggled in year one).

1. After planting, leave them be and let them establish for at least one summer.
2. After that, hard prune them every year in late February or early March.
3. Cut all the stems down to about 6 inches above ground level, just after where the plant begins to branch out at the base.

Unless your soil is very wet, it is a good idea to mulch around your plants after pruning: this will trap moisture and keep down the weeds that will try to take advantage of the extra sunlight.

Dogwood only flowers on wood that is a year old - the flowers aren't special to look at, but the bees will be happy. To increase the wildlife value of the bushes by allowing them to flower, you could also try these regimens:

• Cut them back every other year.
• Cut back most of the stems each year as normal, leaving a couple to flower and then pruning them.

Ornamental dogwoods are right at home added into a mixed country hedge, where they will give you a tickle of extra winter colour (cut them back by about half right after planting as you would any other country hedge plant).