Cornus suecica L.

One of four or five closely-related herbaceous species in subgenus Arctocrania – the so-called ‘bunchberry complex’ – qualifying (at a stretch) for inclusion in the present treatment on the strength of their woody rhizomes. Cornus suecica has an almost circumboreal distribution across northern Europe into Greenland and northern Canada and the Aleutians into northeastern Asia (curiously absent from northern Siberia). Though it can grow in forest conditions, it is better known as a species of moist heathland, where it grows in the shelter of the tight patchwork of low shrubs. In Britain it is a species of moor and mountain, occurring as far south as Lancashire (Turton Moor, near Rivington), sometimes in acid montane grassland, but most frequently found in the Scottish highlands in montane heath at 450–940 m asl (Wilmore & Walker 2020); in England the fruits are produced sparingly (Swan 1993).

First discovered in Britain by the Elizabethan naturalist and physician Thomas Penny (1532–1589), who sent to Clusius (1601) a specimen that is presumed to have been gathered on the Cheviot. Penny must have been a remarkable character, because the Northumbrian marches were a wild and lawless region at that time. (A later botanist, George Johnston remarked that ‘I would give a golden guerdon to see even as in a vision this simpler as he tracked the Percy’s hunting ground and plucked the Cornus’ (Johnston 1853).) The species was refound in the Cheviots a century later, in 1670, by John Ray’s agent Thomas Willisel, and Ray himself saw it the following year at another site close by (Swan 1993). Those early collectors regarded the plant as a honeysuckle (Chamaepericlymenum or Dwarf Honeysuckle), Dillenius (1732) being the first to place it in Cornus (‘Cornus pumila herbacea’). Miller (1741) included it in his treatment of Cornus, under Dillenius’s phrase-name (in subsequent editions as Linnaeus’s ‘Cornus herbacea ramis binis’), noting its being difficult to cultivate and shortlived in gardens.

As Cornus suecica (Swedish Cornel), Linnaeus (1753) distinguished its branched stems from those of the ‘unbranched’ C. canadensis, in which the branches are so short (< 5 mm) as to give the impression of a terminal whorl of leaves (Murrell 1994). Typical C. suecica is also easily told by the uniformly purple petals (cream in C. canadensis), though intermediate forms with C. canadensis, and introgression with their allotetraploid hybrid C. unalashkensis, can make precise identification uncertain (Murrell & Poindexter 2015).

Cultivation is broadly as for C. canadensis, though plants require more sun to thrive. A moist, acid substrate is essential, and it is unlikely to thrive in hot and/or dry conditions.