The American Dogwood, Cornus florida, is not only beloved in the US, but by gardeners worldwide. The trees come in three colours, white, pink and red, of which white is my favourite. Technically, the flowers are the lime green centers, as the pink or white ‘petals’ are actually bracts.

This specimen has particularly broad bracts (petals) and I like the contrast with the carved stone.

But pink is very popular in Japan, or at least the parts of Kyoto where I was staying.

And it stands as a testament of care by an ordinary Japanese residence for a really lovely specimen.

This image (above) I did do a lot of image editing on to soften the brick background, and it's still not great, but since the main point of this image is to provide reference material for dyeing and embroidery designs without copyright issues, that's okay:)

I'm kind of proud of this one: I had two very similar shots of the same dogwood, three days later, but with slightly differing focus; I liked the composition of the first image better, but the three flowers dead center in the image were out of focus; so I clipped the sharp version and slotted them in, giving the both of best worlds. Then I had to fix the blurry doubles, mostly by clipping parts of the background & moving them around (since the shots were taken at ever so slightly different angles). No doubt an experienced graphic artist could spot my changes immediately, but the image looks less obviously edited to me;) But as I said, these are primarily reference shots, not art photography, and all this messing around is to make them “prettier”.^[1]

This shot, of much paler pink dogwood shot on the 26th, is out of the box. Dogwood tends to be shown with the flowers shown closed (as for example in the first 3 shots) but in this image the flowers (centers) have opened, with tiny pistils or stamens sticking out of them.

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Sylvus Tarn