CORNACEA, 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 21 
CORNUS ASPERIFOLIA. 
Dogwood. 
Leaves oblong-oyvate, acute, scabrous on the upper surface. 
Cornus asperifolia, Michaux, 77. Bor.-Am. i. 93 (1803). — 
' Nouveau Duhamel, ii. 156. — Poiret, Lamarck Dict. 
Suppl. ii. 356. — Pursh, 77. Am. Sept. i. 108. — Elliott, 
Sk. i. 209. — Roemer & Schultes, Syst. iii. 322. — Spreng- 
el, Syst. i. 451.— Torrey & Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 651. — 
Rafinesque, Alsograph. Am. 61.— Chapman, Fv. 167. — 
K. Koch, Dendr. i. 692. — Watson & Coulter, Gray’s 
Man. ed. 6, 214. — Coulter & Evans, Bot. Gazette, xv. 
35. — Coulter, Contrib. U. S. Nat. Herb. ii. 150 (Man. Pl. 
W. Texas). —Koehne, Deutsche Dendr. 437. — Dippel, 
Handb. Laubholzk. iii. 253, £ 135.— Sargent, Garden 
and Forest, x. 104, £. 13. — Britton & Brown, Jil. F7. ii. 
Cornus sericea, y asperifolia, De Candolle, Prodr. iv. 272 
(1830). — Don, Gen. Syst. iti. 399. — Loudon, Arb. Brit. 
ii. 1013. 
Cornus alba, Hooker, Compan. Bot. Mag. i. 48 (not Lin- 
neeus) (1835). 
Cornus Drummondi, C. A. Meyer, Bull. Phys. Math. 
Acad. St. Pétersbourg, iii. 372 (1845); Ann. Sei. Nat. 
sér. 3, iv. 64. — Walpers, Rep. v. 933. 
Cornus asperifolia, var. Drummondi, Coulter & Evans, 
Bot. Gazette, xv. 36 (1890).—Coulter, Contrib. U.S. 
Nat. Herb. ii. 151 (Man. Pl. W. Teaxas).— Koehne, 
Deutsche Dendr. 437. 
544, £. 2715. — Britton, Man. 690. — Gattinger, #7. Ten- 
nessee, 130. 
Usually shrubby in habit, Cornus asperifolia on the rich bottom-lands of southern Arkansas and 
eastern Texas is frequently a tree sometimes nearly fifty feet in height, with a short trunk eight or ten 
inches in diameter, and slender erect wand-like branches forming a narrow irregular rather open head. 
The bark of the trunk is about an eighth of an inch in thickness and is divided by shallow fissures 
into narrow interrupted ridges, and broken into small closely appressed dark red-brown scales. The 
branchlets are slender, marked by numerous small pale lenticels, pale green and puberulous when 
they first appear, pale red, lustrous and puberulous during their first winter, light reddish brown in 
their second year, and ultimately light gray-brown or gray. The winter-buds are acute, compressed, 
pubescent, sessile or stalked, about an eighth of an inch long, with two pairs of opposite scales, 
and about twice as large as the much compressed lateral buds. The leaves are opposite, involute in 
vernation, ovate or oblong, gradually or abruptly contracted at the apex into long slender points, 
gradually narrowed and rounded or cuneate at the base, and slightly thickened and undulate on the 
margins; when they unfold they are coated with lustrous silver-white tomentum, and nearly fully 
grown when the flowers open from the middle of May in Texas to the middle of July at the north, 
they are then dark green and roughened above by short rigid white hairs, and pale often glaucous and 
rough-pubescent below; and in the autumn they are membranaceous, scabrous on the upper surface, 
pubescent or puberulous on the lower surface, from three to four inches long and from an inch and a 
half to two inches wide, with thin midribs and from four to six pairs of slender primary veins nearly 
parallel with their sides, and stout grooved pubescent petioles usually about half an inch in length. 
The flowers are produced on slender pedicels in loose broad or narrow often paniculate pubescent cymes 
raised on peduncles frequently an inch in length ; they are cream color, with an oblong cup-shaped 
obscurely toothed calyx covered with fine silky white hairs and narrow oblong acute corolla lobes about 
an eighth of an inch long and reflexed after the flowers open, elongated slender filaments with nodding 
anthers, and a columnar style thickened at the apex into the prominent stigma. The fruit is borne in 
1 The tree only twenty years old, cut by Mr. B. F. Bush near Natural History, New York, was forty-five feet high, with a trunk 
Columbia on the Brazos River in Texas in 1901 for the Jesup Col- seven inches in diameter. 
lection of North American Woods in the American Museum of 
