When should a flowering dogwood be pruned?
Prune in late spring right after bloom or in dormancy, and keep it minimal — dogwood needs very little cutting and every wound is an entry point for dogwood borer. The species trap is that the highest-value work is not in the canopy at all: pulling a proper mulch ring out toward the dripline, kept off the trunk flare, does more for a dogwood than any amount of pruning, because it keeps the string trimmer and mower deck away from the bark the borer is looking for.
Reading flowering dogwood before you cut
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.
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