The flower bracts open up.
Last week, the dogwoods began flowering. The flowers themselves are 2 to 3 inches wide, with four bracts. Each bract is notched at the end, leaving the area around the indentation a reddish-brown splash.
What passes for petals are actually bracts, a specialized type of leaf. That said, when we admire dogwood flowers with others, we will generally refer to the bracts as flowers.
The center of what appears to be the flower contains a cluster of the real flowers, small yellow flowers each less than a quarter inch wide. The flowers are monoecious and the cluster size varies from just a few to about two dozen.
