Should I remove or save my flowering dogwood?
Flowering Dogwood isn't a habitual problem species, so a sound one is usually worth an opinion before it comes out. Flowering dogwood is a forest understory tree that got planted in full-sun subdivision lawns, and most of what looks like disease is really site failure. The classic central Indiana call is "it bloomed beautifully for eight years and now half of it is dead," and the cause is usually mower and trimmer damage at the base, compacted clay, and no afternoon shade rather than any single pathogen.
How to tell which one you've got
Two fungal problems present very differently: powdery mildew, the routine one in the Midwest, films new leaves white and leaves them scorched, curled, and undersized, while dogwood anthracnose (Discula destructiva) starts as tan leaf spots with purple rims, moves into twigs, and kills from the bottom of the tree upward with water sprouts along the trunk. Stress is a mildewed, scorched dogwood that still leafs out and flowers the following spring; dying is progressive lower-limb death with trunk cankers, thin bloom, and a split or hollow pocket at the base where a borer got in behind an old mower wound.
The structural question
Storm damage is rarely why a dogwood comes down — it is short, low, and its horizontal branching sheds snow and ice reasonably well. What actually breaks are limbs already hollowed by dogwood borer or killed by anthracnose, which snap in ordinary wind because they were dead first, so a dogwood limb lost in an ice event should be treated as a symptom worth investigating rather than just debris to clean up.
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