Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat'

There is a version of the flowering dogwood almost nobody has met. Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat' was found in Suwannee County, Florida, by Bob Simons, a forest ecologist who spent half a century protecting the wild hardwood country of north Florida. As a young man in the early 1970s he walked a mixed-hardwood hammock outside Gainesville, decided the place was worth saving, and talked ten landowners and the state into making it San Felasco Hammock; that became the pattern of his life. A man who knew that kind of forest the way most of us know our own street is exactly the sort to notice a dogwood doing something a dogwood is not supposed to do. Woodlanders introduced his low, sprawling oddity to cultivation, and the plant has stayed scarce ever since, the kind of tree you mostly hear about secondhand from someone who saw one and never got over it.

Where the species reaches for the canopy, 'Suwanee Squat' does the opposite, running wide and staying close to the ground, branches layering outward in flat, horizontal tiers. Our stock plant has sat at roughly waist height and four feet across for years now, in no apparent hurry; given a long enough run the tree may slowly gain a little more height, but height has never been the point. The point is the spread, and the architecture of that spread, the way these low limbs pool at the foot of taller things rather than competing with them.

The flowers are pure Cornus florida: four creamy white bracts cupped around a knot of small true flowers, blooming heavily in early spring. Strung out along those low limbs, the bracts read as a scattered horizontal drift instead of the familiar upright cloud, catching light down at the woodland floor where you do not expect to find it. Come autumn the leaves turn through red and burgundy and bronze, a quieter second season. And unlike the contorted, sullen-looking weeping dogwoods this selection sometimes gets shelved beside, 'Suwanee Squat' keeps clean, well-mannered foliage.

Give the tree partial shade to shade and rich, well-drained soil, and resist the urge to plant deep; dogwoods like to sit high, the root flare just grazing the soil line. Let the low limbs cascade over a low wall, settle the pitch of a slope, or build out the layered edge of a shaded bed. Cornus florida is woven deep into the eastern woods and into most of our earliest garden memories. 'Suwanee Squat' is that same familiar tree, lying down, found by a man who spent his life making sure such places stayed standing.