CORNACE. SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 69 
CORNUS NUTTALLII. 
Dogwood. 
Heaps of flower-buds not inclosed; involucral scales 4 to 6, oblong to obovate, 
usually acute at the apex. Leaves ovate or rarely obovate. 
Cornus Nuttallii, Audubon, Birds, t. 467 (1837); Orn. Lyall, Jour. Linn. Soc. vii. 184.— Gray, Proc. Am. 
Biogr. iv. 482. — Torrey & Gray, Fl. N. Am. i. 652. — Acad. viii. 387.— Brewer & Watson, Bot. Cal. i. 274; 
Walpers, Rep. ii. 435. — Bentham, Pl. Hartweg. 314. — ii. 452. — Hall, Bot. Gazette, ii. 88.— Sargent, Forest 
Nuttall, Sylva, iii. 51, t. 97. — Torrey, Pacific R. R. Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 91.— Coulter & 
Rep. iv. 94; Bot. Mex. Bound. Surv. 71; Bot. Wilkes Evans, Bot. Gazette, xv. 33. 
Explor. Exped. 326. — Newberry, Pacific R. R. Rep. vi. Cornus florida, Hooker, Fl. Bor-Am. i. 277 (in part) 
24, 75. — Cooper, Pacific R. R. Rep. xii. pt. ii. 29, 63. — (1833). 
A tree, forty to sixty feet or exceptionally one hundred feet' in height, with a trunk one or two 
feet in diameter, and slender spreading branches which form an oblong-conical or ultimately a round- 
topped head. The bark of the trunk is a quarter of an inch thick, brown tinged with red, and divided 
on the surface into small thin appressed scales. The branchlets are slender, light green, and coated 
when young with pale hairs; in their first winter they are glabrous or puberulous, dark reddish purple 
or sometimes green, conspicuously marked by the elevated lunate leaf-scars, and later become light brown 
or brown tinged with red. The buds, which are formed in July, are acute, a third of an inch in length, 
and covered with two narrowly ovate acute long-pointed puberulous light green opposite scales; the 
terminal bud is accompanied by two pairs of lateral buds, each covered by a single scale; the scales of 
the lower pair usually fall in the autumn and the buds remain undeveloped, and those of the upper 
pair, which are now coated with pale hairs, especially toward the apex, thicken and turn dark purple, 
and, lengthening in the spring with the shoots which they inclose, finally become scarious or often 
develop into small leaves, and in falling mark the base of the branchlets with ring-like scars. The leaves 
are involute in vernation, ovate or slightly obovate, acute and often contracted into short points at 
the apex, wedge-shaped at the base and faintly crenulate-serrate, and are generally clustered toward the 
ends of the branches; when they unfold they are coated below with pale tomentum and are puberulous 
above, while at maturity they are membranaceous, bright green, and slightly puberulous, with short 
appressed hairs on the upper surface and woolly pubescent on the lower, and are four or five inches 
in length and an inch and a half to three inches in breadth, with prominent pale midribs impressed 
above, about five pairs of slender primary veins nearly parallel with their margins and connected by 
remote reticulated veinlets, and stout grooved hairy petioles from one half to two thirds of an inch long, 
with large clasping bases. In the autumn the leaves become brilliant orange and scarlet before falling. 
The head of flower-buds appears during the summer from between the upper pair of lateral leaf-buds, 
and is surrounded at the base but not inclosed by the involucral scales; during the winter it is hemi- 
spherical, covered only at the base by the mvolucre, half an ich in diameter, and is usually nodding 
by the reflexion above the middle of the stout hairy peduncle, which is enlarged at the apex and three 
quarters of an inch to an inch in length. In early spring, when the flowers open, the involucral scales 
have become an inch and a half to three inches long and an inch and a half to two inches wide; they 
are now white or white tinged with pink, narrowly oblong to obovate or sometimes nearly orbicular, 
abruptly acute, acuminate or obtuse, entire and thickened at the apex with the remnants of the portions 
of the scales formed during the previous summer, puberulous on the outer surface, gradually narrowed 
1 Kellogg, Forest Trees of California, 112. 
