Celestial® Rutgers Dogwood

East meets West in this healthy, robust Rutgers Hybrid Dogwood tree that’s easy for even novice gardeners to grow. Celestial® Dogwood (a.k.a. ‘Galaxy’) is a small, upright, ornamental tree that will grace your landscape with loads of large snow-white flowers in spring and ruby-red foliage in fall. Blooming as its Flowering Dogwood “father” fades and before its Japanese Kousa Dogwood “mother” begins, the hybrid Celestial® bridges the gap between these two heavy hitters of spring and looks sweet with irises and columbines planted at its feet.

Forty years ago America’s beloved Flowering Dogwood tree—considered by many to be America’s favorite flowering tree—was threatened by a one-two punch of a pest called Dogwood borer and a disease called Dogwood anthracnose. In the 1970s, legendary plant breeder Dr. Elwin Orton of Rutgers University devised a plan to improve the disease resistance of Flowering Dogwood by hybridizing it with the naturally disease-resistant Asian “Kousa” Dogwood. Dr. Orton’s brilliant program has yielded a bumper crop of fantastic new hybrid Dogwood trees for the garden, including Celestial® Dogwood, the first introduction. It may sound a little funny to think of a tree as an “invention,” but Dr. Orton was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012 for his visionary work.

This is a hybrid between Florida and Kousa Dogwoods. It is very vigorous, blooms heavily, and is resistant to the common Dogwood problems. Large flower bracts open pure white and appear after florida blooms but before kousa blooms. No fruit is produced on this dapper specimen, and it will dress up your front entryway or patio with style, without overwhelming the space.