Cercis canadensis

Few native trees announce spring like Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, whose bare branches flush rosy pink and magenta weeks before the dogwoods open. The small pea-like flowers cluster not just along the twigs but straight from the older branches and even the trunk, a charming trick called cauliflory, and give way to broad, heart-shaped leaves. A small, graceful understory tree of eastern and central North America, redbud belongs in the legume family, kin to peas and beans.

Those early flowers do real work, offering some of the season's first nectar and pollen to native bees, among them the specialist southeastern blueberry bee and the bumblebees. The blossoms are edible too, tart and high in vitamin C, long scattered raw over salads, folded into breads and pancakes, pickled, or fried. For a few weeks each spring the whole small tree seems dipped in pink, cheerful out of all proportion to the modest size.

After the flowers come the leaves, rounded valentines that hold clean green through summer and turn soft yellow in fall, followed by flat, bean-like pods that rattle on the branches into winter. The genus name comes from the Greek kerkis, a weaver's shuttle, for the shape of those pods. Redbud is a legume without the nitrogen-fixing habit of many in the family, grown instead for beauty, for pollinators, and for the sheer welcome of the bloom.

Give Cercis canadensis full sun to part shade and any decent, well-drained soil, and site the tree where the spring show can be seen, at a woodland edge, along a drive, or against a darker evergreen backdrop that sets off the pink. Adaptable, quick to bloom while young, and beloved by early bees, redbud earns a place as a specimen, in a native or pollinator planting, or naturalized at the edge of the woods. This is one of the most cheerful of all the small native trees.