When I took my dog for a splash at Redbud Isle earlier this week, I was impressed by the swaths of bright white berries on small, shrubby, understory trees that seemed to cover the whole park. The hard, white berries have a little black dot on the bottom and grow on reddish branchlets. The 3 to 4 inch leaves are oppositely arranged and have prominent veins that seem to run lengthwise down the leaves parallel to the central vein, rather branching from the central vein as most tree leaves do – although ginkgo is the only tree that truly has parallel veins. As the leaf texture implies, the tree was Roughleaf dogwood (Cornus drummondii), a deciduous tree that would have had creamy white blooms that fed butterflies just a few weeks earlier. Roughleaf dogwood has purplish-red fall color, spreads by suckers and is useful for erosion control – as was evident from it’s predominance along the banks of the park. If you would like to see the masses of white berries for yourself, you’d better hurry on over to Redbud Isle before the birds devour them all!
Learn more about this tree from our partners at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.
