What IS that Tree Blooming?

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
March 13th, 2009
Filed in Trees and Shrubs
Tags: tree, Trees and Shrubs

If you live in the frozen wasteland that is Canada (LOVE you Chris! , you probably don’t have a lot of trees blooming yet. You will soon, though. I thought I would give you a little picture-dictionary to help you identify your trees. Every year around this time, I almost get into many car wrecks because I am rubbernecking at the trees blooming along my way to and from work, etc. Here are some of the spring beauties I am looking for.

Spring Trees in Bloom

Cherry Trees:  Prunus

The tree pictured, left, is a cherry tree. I chose this picture for a variety of reasons, one of which is that it clearly shows the lenticils. Because a lot of flowering trees are in the rose family, and their flowers all look fairly similar, it can be a little bit different to tell blooming trees apart. Cherry trees have a distinct marking on their bark: the lenticil. All trees have these, but cherry trees have very long, horizontal lenticils, making it look like their trunks have horizontal stripes. If a tree has these, you can be fairly certain that it is a cherry tree. The lenticils help the tree breathe. (Birch trees also have lenticils, but they also usually have shedding bark, and the lenticils are taller, vertically and shorter, horizontally.)

Eastern Redbud: Cercis canadensis

One of my favorite trees is the redbud tree. It is an understory tree native to most of the Eastern United States. If it grows out in the sun, the canopy develops into a bell shape. if it grows on the edge of the woods, it has a less regular habit–more like arms reaching upward and outward. It has tiny, pinkish-purpleish, pea-shaped flowers that bloom straight from the branches. (Sometimes you will see flowers sprouting from up and down the trunk.) The flowers bloom before the leaves emerge.

Hawthorn:  Crataegus

Hawthorn trees grow in a variety of shapes. They can grow as messy, shrubby-looking multi-stemmed trees, or as a single-stemmed tree. They bloom right around the same time as the redbuds, and have HUGE thorns. Their thorns are sometimes two inches long. Wear safety glasses if you prune around these!

Dogwood:  Cornus

This picture is actually a pacific dogwood, but the flowers look very similar on most dogwood trees, with some variations in shape of the bracts (what look like “petals”) and size of leaves. I liked this picture because you can see the flowers clearly, as well as the platform-like growth habit at the edge of the woods. If you look at a dogwood from afar, it looks like the tree branches grow in stair-steps.

Be careful driving out there!

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