Cornus sanguinea L.

Cornus sanguinea, the Common Dogwood or Dogberry, is native to Europe, found in hedgerows, and wild in open woodland, on base-rich soils including limestone. Unprepossessing in its wild state, the plant is best known as a cultivated or semi-cultivated shrub, its wand-like red-pigmented young stems long put to practical use for basketry and cordage, and more recently exploited for their ornamental qualities.

The Linnean epithet ‘sanguinea’ picks up on the widely used early-modern name for the species, ‘virga sanguinea’ (‘bloody rod’) (Gerard 1597; Bauhin 1651), alluding to the reddish pigmentation of the young bark. Bean, who was unimpressed by the colouring of isolated stems – ‘little more than an occasional dark red tinge on the exposed side’ – mistakenly assumed ‘sanguinea’ to have referred instead to the autumnal foliage, which does indeed turn ‘blood red’ in autumn (Bean 1976; Withering 1801). Pliny dealt with the ‘bloody bush’ (‘sanguinei frutices’) along with poplar, elm, birch, split reeds and willow in his discussion of binding materials in Book 16 of the Natural History – the red-tinted withies were harvested annually from bushes pruned back to a stool or ‘fist’ (pugno), just as is done today for aesthetic purposes. The historical ‘bloody rod’ persists to the present in the Romance languages (e.g. Italian ‘verga sanguigna’); compare also the Tuscan ‘sanguigno’ (Mattioli 1568). It is curious, however, that there are no cultivars of C. sanguinea selected for red stems: in gardens that function is provided by cultivars of C. alba, with C. sanguinea providing stems in shades from bright green through yellow to rich orange-red.

As the ‘female cornus’ (from Ancient Greek thelycrania), Cornus sanguinea has passed down to us as one half of Theophrastus’s male-female pair, opposed to the ‘manly’ Cornel (Cornus mas) with its warlike uses. Turner (1548) reported the English vernacular name as ‘Gadrise, or dog tree’. ‘Gad-rise’ (from ‘gad’ meaning a wand or rod) is clearly an allusion to the annual springing of new withies from the stool, but the canine component of ‘dog tree’ has proved more obscure, occasioning numerous explanations of varying plausibility (see the genus entry).

Among its numerous uses, the tough wood served for mill-cogs, and butchers’ skewers, whence also ‘Prycke tree’ or Prick-wood (Turner 1551; Withering 1801) – a derivation from ‘dag’ meaning spike has also often be proposed on these grounds, but is unconvincing. Mattioli (1568) described the production of lamp oil from the seeds in the Italian Alps (Trentino), and Pietro Arduino (1766) noted that the berries were as oil-rich as olives and the oil comparable in flavour if sharper in odour. Widely used as a hedge plant, Cornus sanguinea was both plentiful and low in stature, which made it convenient for harvesting by women and children (unlike olives). Bean (1976) describes the flowers as having a ‘heavy odour’, and the berries as bitter tasting; Miller (1735) reports their being falsely sold as buckthorn. Loudon makes the curious observation (unconfirmed by the present authors) that the bark tastes of apples (Loudon 1844).

In modern times, Cornus sanguinea is grown chiefly for its aesthetic value, stooled dogwood being a now ubiquitous component of ‘winter interest’ plantings. Such displays are rescued from cliché by the sheer vibrancy of some of the newer introductions, which have extended the dogwood spectrum towards orange and yellow, and can be breathtaking when light and skies conspire. The remarkable crimson-orange wands of ‘Anny’s Winter Orange’ (to cite one example) take on an almost fluorescent aspect on a grey day, transfiguring the drabbest winter landscape. At the other end of the colour range, the striking stems of ‘Green Light’ and ‘New Green’ contribute a startlingly spring-like shade of grass-green to the off-season palette. The production of such stems depends on pruning to encourage the production of new growth. It is generally considered important to let C. sanguinea become thoroughly established, for up to three years, before any coppicing is done. Thereafter it can be undertaken annually, if required, either by pruning the stems to a short ‘leg’ or flat to ground level. The latter is practised with great success at RHS Garden Harlow Carr in Harrogate, UK, and avoids the potential ugliness of stubby stem remnants.

Aside from its vibrant stems, Cornus sanguinea is generally thought to have relatively little to offer, dismissed as ‘undistinguished’ by Bean (1976) and ‘scarcely worthy of garden room’ by Graham Stuart Thomas (1992), though both spare a grudging word for the autumn foliage colour, which can be long lasting, and spectacular in some clones. Indeed, the species is a major contributor, usually in bright clear yellow, to the display of autumn colour seen along the banks of many British major roads, often alongside the reds of Viburnum opulus and oranges of Prunus avium. And although the species is not generally thought of as a flowering plant, plants growing in such situations – in full sun and subject to slight stress – can be whitened in late spring by an abundance of inflorescences. In winter, the shrub could be confused with C. alba (Tatarian Dogwood) of more easterly distribution, whose young red stems are more flamboyantly crimson, and whose berries are white, maturing to blue; that species is also unlikely to be found on dry chalky soils (Thomas 1992). The bright spring growth of some cultivars, notably ‘Midwinter Fire’ and some of its kin, should also not be overlooked as an ornamental quality.

Five infraspecific taxa are recognised by POWO (30/4/26), mainly on the basis of geography and trichome type, though most readers will probably feel that there is more than one sense in which this involves splitting hairs. More than a little nomenclatural untangling will be required as part of the much needed taxonomic revision of Cornus, but for horticultural purposes the broad concept of C. sanguinea suffices, though it may be useful to be aware of a broad tendency towards a more downy type of pubescence in the north of the range. Subsp. australis (C.A.Mey.) Jáv. (syn. Cornus australis C.A.Mey.) occurs from Austria eastwards to Ukraine and the Transcaucasus (introduced in northern Europe including Britain), first distinguished by Meyer (1845) as a species in its own right. The two taxa have commonly been separated on the basis of the abaxial foliar trichomes, which in subsp. australis have two equal arms, both appressed (i.e. ‘compass hairs’), in contrast to the nominate subspecies’ unequal arms, some of which are not appressed (Riebl, Meve & Aas 2017; Stace 2010). Populations in the extreme south of the subsp. australis range with slimmer calyx teeth have been distinguished as subsp. cilicica (Eyde 1988). Intermediate forms from central Europe (also reported from naturalised material in Britain) have been referred to the nothosubspecies czerniaewii Grosset, treated elsewhere in the Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian and Austrian literature at nothospecific rank as C. sanguinea × australis (Riebl, Meve & Aas 2017). The status of subsp. hungarica (Kárpáti) Soó appears ambiguous, since Kárpáti’s C. hungarica names the same hybrid (C. australis × C. sanguinea) (Săvulescu 1958). The molecular study of Du et al. (2023) suggested that subsp. australis ought to be recognised as a species in its own right, placed close to C. walteri in the phylogeny, but the existence of North American trees grown as C. australis one of which (at the JC Raulston Arboretum) turned out to be indeed a large specimen of C. walteri (M. Weathington, pers. comm. 2026), means that any conclusions relating to this taxon ought to be treated with circumspection until the identities of the plants involved have been established beyond doubt.

In Britain, subsp. australis is widespread, probably far more so than is generally realised (Stace 2010), since it is difficult to tell from the type subspecies on general impression alone. This is not the case with another taxon, Cornus koenigii C.K.Schneid., placed in synonymy with subsp. australis by some authorities (e.g. POWO 14/5/20262), but morphologically distinct, with larger leaves (13 × 8 cm with 4–6 vein pairs), longer petioles, larger fruits (10 mm across), with the same leaf hairs as type sanguinea – the flowers are said by Eyde (1988) to have purple anthers. Cornus koenigii was described from plants found near Batumi, Georgia (Schneider 1909), and is represented in many collections in the United States and Europe. This plant – presumably in the form of escapes from cultivation – is regularly detected by British botanists in woods and hedgerows, as are fertile intermediates (Sell 2006). This casts an interesting light on reports from Lithuania and Latvia, where naturalised plants referred to subsp. australis have been found to be quite distinct in habit from native subsp. sanguinea, being described as ‘unusually tall and highly fertile [and] tree-like,’ and growing in stands large enough to raise suspicions of possible invasiveness (Gudžinskas & Petrulaitis 2021).