Don the flowers of the native flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, grow singly?
No. The tiny yellow flowers are actually clustered tightly together in the middle of the four showy bracts. While the whole thing looks like a flower with four petals and golden stamens in the middle, it is correctly referred to as an inflorescence, which is a botanical term for a flower cluster. The bracts attract pollinating insects to the flowers that lie between them, much as petals attract pollinators to many flowers, but the bracts are modified leaves and cannot be correctly called petals. There may be as many as twenty small flowers sandwiched tightly between the four bracts.
