National Arboretum

This afternoon, we headed over to the National Arboretum to take a walk around the dogwood and Asian collections on the east side next to the Anacostia River. It is directly across from the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens where we were yesterday afternoon. Generally speaking we don’t know much about plants other than some are quite nice to look at.

Dogwood Collection

We do have dogwoods locally so seeing them isn’t really anything new. But the ones in the arboretum are much denser than the ones at home!

So many dogwoods! There aren’t really a huge number of trees but the ones that they do have are mostly very large and very dense.

There were a few smaller dogwoods with pink flowers. Reading a bit about dogwoods, it turns out that the pretty big petals aren’t actually petals at all. It is well described online but Roads End Naturalist has a good description with detailed photography that helps to explain it all. Basically, the actual flowers are tiny and grow out of the little ball at the middle of the not-actually-petals.

This is also a dogwood though it looks very different from the familiar ones. It is a Cornus kousa, commonly known as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or kousa dogwood. This particular variant, the Angela Palmer, has whiteish leaves but otherwise seems like it should bloom like other dogwoods.

Asian Collection

We quickly wandered into the Asian collection which is adjacent to the dogwoods.

This is an interesting flower. The way the petals seem to be separated into mostly white with some pink is interesting and not something we’ve noticed before.

These red berries form the general shape of a strawberry!

These red flowers seem to be on the verge of opening. Or is this just how they look when in bloom? The ones on the other branches aren’t at this phase yet.