Most people are at least familiar with flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, and can even recognize it by the bark (pun intended), which has a characteristic texture of fissures leaving small square plates compared to the courser texture of other trees with a similar bark pattern. The twigs have distinctive scars that allow any identification as a dogwood in winter. The leaves also have a venation pattern, known as arcuate, where the secondary veins extend nearly to the leaf margin then curve and continue to the tip. The familiar flowers actually have bracts rather than petals. These are very pale pink rather than white and rather than selecting cultivars with a mutation that prevents expression of color the pink and red dogwoods probably have a mutation of the gene that suppress expression of color thus allowing darker shades of pigment. This gene is probably important elsewhere considering that pink and red dogwoods don’t seem to be as vigorous as those that appear white. Most of the other dogwoods don’t have these petalous bracts, their flowers are in open rather than compact clusters, and the fruits are often a striking blue color rather than red.
Much misinformation
about flowering dogwood is due to a legend related to the Easter story. I know some people will be offended to learn
that there is absolutely no truth in this legend and they typically give
ignorant arguments like “You weren’t there so you don’t know if it is not true,”
which is about the same as me not knowing if they still beat their wife. The legend is that dogwood was once a large
tree with colorful flowers, but it was so shamed at being used for the cross
that it lost its color and no longer grows large enough to ever be used as a
cross. Additionally the flowers are in a
cross shape and the "petals" have blood stains on the tips, plus the center of the flower represents the
crown of thorns. There is no reference
to the legend in the Bible, contrary to what some of the more offended
believe. There are no dogwoods,
especially any that have four blood stained petalous bracts, that are native to
the
Five other dogwoods are
native to
There are about a dozen other native dogwoods, some with duplicate common names, or notable escaped exotic dogwoods where gray dogwood (C. racemosa), red-oiser dogwood (C. sericea), and bunch berry (C. canadensis) are the most encountered and interestingly bunchberry is the smallest while Pacific dogwood (C. nuttallii) is the largest. The exotic kousa dogwood (C. kousa) is often planted as a substitute for flowering dogwood due to resistance to anthracnose, a fungal disease that attacks the leaves and eventually results in killing the plant, although resistant cultivars have been found and cultural considerations help limit susceptibility by avoiding microclimates conducive to fungal growth. Kousa blooms after the leaves rather than before like flowering dogwood thus the later would still be preferred for this reason alone.
The name dogwood is probably a corruption of dagger-wood where the hard wood was used as a meat skewer. Additionally the genus name comes from the Latin word for horn, which is also indicative of the hardness of the wood.