Dogwood Tree News

Rutgers’ New Pink Dogwood Adds Breakthrough Color to the Landscape (Rutgers Today, 2017)

Rutgers researchers have developed a hardy, pink dogwood tree that promises to add vibrant color to the landscape in New Jersey and beyond.

The new dogwood, called Scarlet Fire®, is the answer to a riddle that has eluded plant biologists for decades. It achieves the brilliant color associated with the native Cornus florida species that has been plagued by blight in the hardier Cornus kousa – an Asian species that is resistant to most diseases but lacked some of the color that made the native species so attractive.

World-famous, yet nameless: Hybrid flowering dogwoods named by Rutgers scientists (Phys.org, 2015)

Garden lovers and horticulturalists now have two new species names to add to their vocabulary and memory. The world’s most commercially-successful dogwood garden trees have finally received proper scientific names decades after their introduction into horticulture. The big-bracted, or flowering, dogwoods are beloved trees with cloud-like branches blossoming in early spring in white, sometimes red or pink. The new scientific names are published by a team of American scientists.

• Rutgers Plant Breeder Elwin Orton Inducted into NJ Inventors Hall of Fame (SEBS & NJAES Newsroom, 2012)
• Ornamental Breeder Elwin Orton Awarded Hutchinson Medal from Chicago Horticultural Society (SEBS & NJAES Newsroom, 2014)
• New dogwood tree variety developed by Rutgers is pretty … and tough! (NJ 101.5, 2017)
• Rutgers’ new pink dogwood offers a color breakthrough (My Central Jersey, 2017)
• The dogwood tree — the living symbol of the American spring — makes a comeback (The Washington Post, 2017)
• Rutgers researchers unleash “Scarlet Fire” dogwood; VIDEO: Native dogwoods under attack (NorthJersey.com, 2017)
• Introducing Scarlet Fire® Dogwood (Arbor Day Foundation, 2018)