Cornus

Lore & Background

The name Cornus is the Latin word for the cornel tree, Cornus mas, and means 'horn', presumably applied to the cherry after the Greek word for 'cherry'. An older English name is whipple-tree, appearing in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, cognate with Middle Low German wipel-bom and Dutch wepe, referring to the tree's waving branches. Dogwoods have simple, untoothed leaves with distinctively curving veins.

Most species have opposite leaves, though a few have alternate leaves. Flowers have four parts, and in many species the flowers are borne in open clusters, while in others they are tightly clustered and surrounded by large, typically white petal-like bracts. The fruits are drupes with one or two seeds, often brightly colorful; those of subgenus Cornus are edible, while those of subgenus Swida are mildly toxic to people but eaten by birds.

Dogwoods are widely planted horticulturally, and the dense wood is valued for specialized purposes such as cutting boards, fine turnings, loom shuttles, tool handles, and roller skates. The wood has a density of 0.79 and is an excellent substitute for persimmon wood in golf club heads. Various species are used as food plants by larvae of butterflies and moths, including the emperor moth and several case-bearers of the genus Coleophora.

Reader's Guide

Cornus is a genus of significant botanical and horticultural importance, comprising 30–60 species of woody plants native across temperate and boreal Eurasia, North America, and parts of South America. The genus is notable for its morphological diversity: some species have inconspicuous flowers surrounded by large, showy bracts, while others bear open clusters of petal-bearing flowers. The fruits, or drupes, vary in edibility—those of subgenus Cornus are edible and commercially sold, such as Cornus kousa and Cornus mas, while those of subgenus Swida are mildly toxic to humans but consumed by birds. Horticulturally, dogwoods are ubiquitous in American gardens, particularly the flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), though in Northwest Europe it flowers poorly due to lack of sharp winters and hot summers.

Several stoloniferous species with bright red or yellow stems are used in highway and naturalizing plantings. The wood is dense and fine-grained, prized for small items like tool handles, roller skates, and golf club heads, though it is rarely available commercially. Dogwood bark has been used in traditional medicine as a substitute for quinine, and the Japanese cornel (Cornus officinalis) is used in traditional Chinese medicine. The genus also serves as a food plant for various butterfly and moth larvae.