Cornus

Cornus is a genus of about 30–60 species of woody plants in the family Cornaceae, commonly known as dogwoods or cornels, which can generally be distinguished by their blossoms, berries, and distinctive bark. Most are deciduous trees or shrubs, but a few species are nearly herbaceous perennial subshrubs, and some species are evergreen. Several species have small heads of inconspicuous flowers surrounded by an involucre of large, typically white petal-like bracts, while others have more open clusters of petal-bearing flowers. The various species of dogwood are native throughout much of temperate and boreal Eurasia and North America, with China, Japan, and the southeastern United States being particularly rich in native species. The genus is also known from South America with members such as Cornus peruviana.

Species include the common dogwood Cornus sanguinea of Eurasia, the widely cultivated flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) of eastern North America, the Pacific dogwood Cornus nuttallii of western North America, the Kousa dogwood Cornus kousa of eastern Asia, and two low-growing boreal species, the Canadian and Eurasian dwarf cornels (or bunchberries), Cornus canadensis and Cornus suecica respectively.

Depending on botanical interpretation, the dogwoods are variously divided into one to nine genera or subgenera; a broadly inclusive genus Cornus is accepted here.

Cornus is the Latin word for the cornel tree, Cornus mas. The name cornel dates to the 1550s, via German from Middle Latin cornolium, ultimately from the diminutive cornuculum, of cornum, the Latin word for the cornel cherry. Cornus means "horn", presumably applied to the cherry after the example of κερασός, the Greek word for "cherry", which itself is of pre-Greek origin but reminiscent of κέρας, the Greek word for "horn".

The name "dog-tree" entered the English vocabulary before 1548, becoming "dogwood" by 1614. Once the name dogwood was affixed to this kind of tree, it soon acquired a secondary name as the hound's tree, while the fruits came to be known as "dogberries" or "houndberries" (the latter a name also for the berries of black nightshade, alluding to Hecate's hounds).^{[citation needed]}

The name was explained, from as early as the 16th century itself, as derived from dag "skewer", as the wood of the tree was said to have been used to make butcher's skewers. This is uncertain, as the form *dagwood was never attested. It is also possible that the tree was named for its berry, called dogberry from at least the 1550s, where the implication could be that the quality of the berry is inferior, as it were "fit for a dog".

An older name of the dogwood in English is whipple-tree, occurring in a list of trees (as whipultre) in Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales. This name is cognate with the Middle Low German wipel-bom "cornel", Dutch wepe, weype "cornel" (the wh- in Chaucer is unetymological, the word would have been Middle English wipel). The tree was so named for waving its branches, cf. Middle Dutch wepelen "totter, waver", Frisian wepeln, German wippen.

The name whippletree, also whiffle-tree, now refers to an element of the traction of a horse-drawn cart linking the draw pole of the cart to the harnesses of the horses in file. In this sense it is first recorded in 1733. This mechanism was usually made from oak or ash (and not from dogwood), and it is unlikely that there is a connection to the name for whipple-tree for Cornus.