The fruit on serviceberries can also be quite tasty if you can get any before the birds. Autumn Brilliance has good tasting fruit.

Serviceberry is eaten by birds, squirrels, chipmunks and my wife and I. They make the best pie you ever hung a lip on with a flavor like a cross between blueberry and apple. The blooms may not last long if you get a hot spring, but the fall color is always great.

tj

I had a serviceberry once, the berries were small and seedy. Pretty tasty, but nothing special. Seedy was my main impression. The tree was old and big, so it must have been the variety. So, if you want to eat the berries, pay a lot of attention to whether that is a feature when you buy it.

My still small Amelanchier 'Autumn Brilliance' had a few blooms this year and I was looking forward to tasting the berries, but the birds beat me to it. This variety is a cross of A. laevis (the "Sarvis" native to WV) and arborea (downy serviceberry).

Serviceberries are susceptible to cedar apple rust. The berries ripen in May/June. Birds aren't eating my berries because they're rusty. Your county extension office should be able to tell you whether rust is an issue in your area.

IME, serviceberry ( specifically, Autumn Brilliance) has better tasting fruit, much shorter flower show, average to good fall color, hardier than flowering dogwood (other dogwoods like roughleaf are MUCH hardier than c. florida).

Flowering dogwood (c. florida) can be bought in a range of flower colors as well as some having variegated leaves. Flowering dogwood is much fussier initially with soil conditions and water but pretty durable when established and sited correctly. Both flowering and fall color have been better for me than serviceberry.

In my zone 7b/8a yard, full sun would be serviceberry, and a more shaded area would be flowering dogwood. Flowering dogwood can definately take full sun as long as the roots stay cool, though.

It's worth noting that "Flowering dogwood" is called that because Latin name is Cornus Florida, not because it is the only dogwood that flowers or has pretty, abundant flowers. Alternate leaf Dogwood (Cornus alternafolia) is another very pretty native dogwood.

There is also Cornus mas, C. kousa and a host of cross species hybrids, all of which produce lovely flowers and wildlife attracting fruit.

I don't know where you're located but here in Chicagoland I have half a dozen serviceberries, including at least three different kinds. They only flower for about a week in late April here. The berries are getting ripe right right now. The birds love them, especially the robins. Sometimes I pick them and eat them myself. The leaves turn a soft orange in the fall. My older ones are small graceful trees 12 to 15 ft tall and make a nice sized tree for a one-story house.

I think dogwoods are nicer-looking trees, to be honest. I have an "Autumn Brilliance" serviceberry, and it's spectacular in bloom every year and the small berries are a welcome tree if you can beat the the birds to them BUT the leaf canopy is sparse, it has never filled in nicely and it's firmly established.

Contrast that with dogwoods -- IME sometimes they flower, sometimes they don't (when they do they're gorgeous), and if they do it's followed by gumball-sized, alien-looking red balls which are pretty cool to look at. The leaf canopy is much fuller than that of the serviceberry and overall just a more attractive tree. I have C. kousa dogwoods.

The serviceberry bushes are a different story. They're pretty slow-growing, but they fill in nicely and make an attractive rounded mound of greenery after flowering and fruiting.