Cornus

A tough, adaptable deciduous large shrub or small tree, Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) opens clusters of bright yellow flowers on bare stems in late winter - among the earliest woody nectar of the year - then ripens glossy red, olive-shaped edible fruit and finishes with good autumn colour. Native to central and southern Europe and western Asia (POWO), it carries the RHS Award of Garden Merit and is rated fully hardy (H6).

The state flower of North Carolina and an iconic understory tree of eastern North American woodland margins, producing white (occasionally pink in var. rubra) "flowers" in spring - actually large showy bracts surrounding the small true flowers in the center. Layered horizontal branching, scarlet fall foliage, and persistent red drupes that sustain songbirds through fall migration make this a four-season landscape plant. Susceptible to dogwood anthracnose (Discula destructiva), particularly at higher elevations - siting and disease awareness are load-bearing.

Gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa) is not the dogwood most people arrive looking for. Flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, is the small tree with four big white bracts that read as petals; gray dogwood is a shrub with no bracts at all, and its flowers are small, white, four-petalled and packed into a domed terminal cluster. It is grown for stems, fruit and birds. The ornamental peak comes after the fruit, not during it: the drupes ripen white through August into October, the birds strip them within days, and what is left standing is the flower stalk itself, which by then has coloured a hard bright red and holds that colour for weeks against the greying autumn foliage. Missouri Botanical Garden makes the same observation from the other direction, describing the red terminal stems as contrast to the white berries. That is also the field mark - white fruit on RED pedicels separates it from silky dogwood, whose fruit is blue, and from pagoda dogwood, whose blue-black fruit sits on red stalks but on alternate leaves and tiered horizontal branches. The honest caveat is the same trait that makes it valuable. Gray dogwood suckers from underground rhizomes and forms thickets, and it is the most aggressive of the three at it. In a hedgerow, on a streambank, on an eroding slope or in a bird planting that is precisely what you want and MBG says so outright - plant it in groups and leave it alone to spread. Against a mown lawn edge or a tidy border it is a permanent annual chore, because you are not managing a shrub, you are managing a clone. Decide which of those two plantings you are making before you buy it, because the decision is very hard to reverse once the rhizomes are out past the original crown.

Kousa dogwood is a small deciduous tree native to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China, grown for its long-lasting late-spring flower display - four pointed white bracts surrounding inconspicuous yellow-green flowers - followed by scarlet strawberry-like compound fruits in late summer. It blooms about a month later than the American flowering dogwood and is strongly resistant to dogwood anthracnose disease (Discula destructiva), making it the safer ornamental choice in most gardens. The honest catch is its soil chemistry demand: it requires acidic, well-drained soil and will develop iron chlorosis and fail to thrive in alkaline or waterlogged conditions - and the strawberry-sized fruits that drop in autumn are sticky and messy on paving.

The western counterpart of eastern flowering dogwood - a small deciduous tree of the Pacific coast with horizontal, tiered branching and a rounded-to-conical crown. Its showy spring "flowers" are actually a tight central cluster of tiny purple-green true flowers ringed by six large white petal-like bracts (eastern flowering dogwood has four). Elliptic dark green leaves color yellow to orange to red in fall, and the 1/3-inch fruits ripen to showy bright red or orange that feed songbirds, squirrels, and deer.

Pagoda dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) is the dogwood that kills itself from the top down, and the disease has a name worth learning before you plant one. Golden canker (Cryptodiaporthe corni) turns an infected branch a bright, unmistakable golden-yellow speckled with orange fruiting bodies, kills the wood beyond it, and - if it reaches the trunk - kills everything above the point it got in. No fungicide controls it. The only treatment is cutting the branch out 4 to 6 inches below the yellow tissue and disinfecting the shears between cuts, and the only prevention is siting: the fungus takes hold on plants that are drought-stressed or heat-stressed, which is why this is a part-shade, cool-rooted, evenly-moist plant rather than a lawn specimen in full afternoon sun. Missouri Botanical Garden's culture line points the same way - some afternoon shade is appreciated in hot summer climates such as the St. Louis area - and the species genuinely thins out towards the southern edge of its range. Set that against what you get. Nothing else in the genus builds a frame like this: strongly horizontal branches held in separate tiers with gaps of air between them and the tips turned up, on a flat-topped crown 15 to 25 feet tall and often WIDER than tall at 20 to 32 feet. And it is the odd one out botanically - every other dogwood you are likely to meet in a garden has opposite leaves, and this one is alternate, which is exactly what the epithet says and the fastest field call in the genus. Two expectations to reset. If you arrived here from the word dogwood you are probably picturing Cornus florida and its four big white bracts; pagoda dogwood has NO showy bracts at all, just genuinely small cream flowers in flat open cymes, and it is grown for its architecture, its fruit and its birds. And the fruit is the field separation within this shrub group: pagoda dogwood ripens blue-black drupes on coral-RED stalks, silky dogwood ripens blue, gray dogwood ripens white on red pedicels. The birds sort all three out within days of ripening.

A native northern + western North American deciduous shrub with brilliant red winter stems (the design-defining trait), white spring flower clusters, white-to-blue drupes, and orange-red fall foliage. Tolerates wet feet + cold winters; among the most reliable winter-interest native shrubs for cold landscapes.

Silky dogwood is not the plant most people mean when they say dogwood, and settling that is the first job of this record. Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood, is a small tree carrying four huge white bracts in April. Cornus amomum is a 6 to 12 foot multi-stemmed wetland shrub whose flowers are tiny yellowish-white things in flat-topped cymes about 3 inches across, and nobody plants it for them. It is planted for blue fruit, for birds, and above all for holding wet ground and streambanks together. The second thing to settle is the winter stems, because silky dogwood is routinely bought as a cheaper stand-in for red-osier dogwood and the buyer is routinely disappointed: Missouri Botanical Garden describes the twigs as purplish brown, which is not the lacquered arterial red of Cornus sericea, and by the second or third year they have gone grey anyway. Where it genuinely beats its siblings is the fruit and the ground it will take. The drupes ripen white and then blue through August, and MBG rates the plant medium to wet while the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center rates its water use high and its habitat as forested seasonal wetlands, floodplains, shrub wetlands and stream and pond banks. That is why it is one of the standard species in riparian restoration across eastern North America, usually planted as a cheap bare-root bundle from a conservation district rather than as a nursery specimen. Two honest warnings. It suckers and it layers - MBG states plainly that branches touching the ground may root at the nodes and that left alone the shrub may spread to form thickets - which is precisely the point on a streambank and a permanent chore against a tidy border. And what arrives may not be what was ordered: Cornus obliqua, the pale dogwood, is treated by many floras as a separate species and by MBG as Cornus amomum subsp. obliqua on a page of its own, the two hybridise where they meet, and conservation-grade stock sold as silky dogwood is frequently one, the other, or a mix.