CXCIX.— THE DOGWOOD. 
Cornus sanguined Linne. 
T HE Cornace# , the third Family of the Order JJmbelliflora , belong, like the 
Umbellifer<e, mainly to the North Temperate Zone, whilst, like the Araliace<e y 
they are mostly woody plants. They have generally opposite, exstipulate, simple 
leaves ; crowded inflorescences of small polysymmetric, perfect, and mostly 
tetramerous flowers ; and an inferior drupaceous fruit with from one to four stony 
endocarps. The Family is represented in our gardens by the so-called Spotted 
Laurel (. Aucuba japonica Thunberg), which is dioecious. 
The genus Cornus includes nearly thirty species, some herbaceous, but the 
majority shrubby. Its small white or yellow flowers have four minute superior 
sepals, four valvate petals, four stamens, and a two-chambered ovary, with a single 
style, and one pendulous anatropous ovule in each chamber. It probably derived its 
name from the Latin cornu , a horn, from the horny texture of the wood. Of two 
species common in Europe, the larger, now generally known as the Cornelian Cherry, 
is mentioned by Homer, Virgil, and Theophrastus, and came to be known as the 
“ male ” ( Cornus mas Linnd). Its fruit, resembling a small plum, has a very harsh 
taste, but after being kept becomes pleasantly acid, and is used in Germany for 
preserves and in Turkey for flavouring sherbet, while the bark furnishes a red dye. 
Our species was known as the “ female ” ( Cornus fcemina ) ; while Pliny writes of it as 
Virga sanguinea , or Bloody Twig, with reference to the red shoots and foliage in 
autumn. Turner, in first recording it as a British plant, writes, in 1548, under the 
head of Cornus : — 
“The female is plentuous in Englande & the buchers make prickes of it, some cal it Gadrise or dog tree, howe be it there 
is an other tree that they cal dogrise also.” 
He seems here to recognise that “rise” means a tree or shrub, but to have 
no suspicion of any identity of signification between Gadrise and Dogrise. Neither 
apparently had Gerard, who has Dogberrie-tree in the Catalogue of his garden (1599), 
and says in his “ Herball ” (1597) : — 
“ In the North countrey they call it Gaten tree, or Gater tree, the berries whereof seem to be those which Chaucre 
calleth Gater beries.” 
It is interesting to come across this reference to Chaucer in Gerard’s “ Herball ” ; 
but the passage in the “ Nonnes Preestes Tale ” to which it relates has the further 
importance that it indicates the use of the berries of the Dogwood as a laxative in 
the fourteenth century, while Philip Miller in the eighteenth records their being 
often brought to market and sold as those of the Buckthorn for the same purpose. 
Partelote, the hen, in Chaucer’s poem, recommends Chaunticlere, the cock, to have 
“laxatives ... of gaitre-berries.” 
Even Matthiolus, in 1554, while giving us the interesting information that 
the people of Trent extracted a lamp-oil from its berries by boiling, thinks it 
