The dogwood days of April are upon us. Look closely. Those four white “petals” surrounding the flower head are not petals at all, but simply modified leaves called bracts. They serve to draw attention to pollinators and tourists to the cluster of tiny greenish-yellow flowers at the intersection of the creamy white “petals.”
Botanists call dogwood Cornus florida. “Florida” means flowering. The genus name Cornus, derives from the Latin cornu, meaning horn, referring to the horn-like hardness of the wood. There are about 60 species, mostly northern temperate climate small trees and shrubs. Twenty species are found in North America, mostly shrubs.
The wood of dogwood is very hard, heavy and dense and takes on a high polish. Although never used as lumber as such, in early America it was used for making small durable objects, including mill wheel cogs and the small parts of other wooden machinery susceptible to wear. The well-seasoned wood is subject to crack as it dries, but once dry it will not fray when hit with a hard object, so was used for chisel and hammer handles, mallet heads, and wooden vices. Weavers long enjoyed shuttles and bobbins made from the wood.
In the early years of industrial manufacturing, textile mills used boxwood from Turkey for weaving shuttles, but after the Civil War a roller skate craze consumed the boxwood supply. Boatloads of flowering dogwood trunks were shipped to Europe to supply the demand for industrial weaving shuttles. The tree was once much more abundant than it is today.
Starting around 1803, following publication of a doctoral dissertation on the value of dogwood for “intermittent fevers,” better known as malaria, dogwood’s inner bark was a preferred alternative to Peruvian bark, Jesuit’s bark, or cinchona – chief source of the drug quinine, long the standard drug for malaria. During the Civil War years dogwood bark was used almost exclusively to treat malaria in Confederate field hospitals.
One of the more iconic symbolic trees of the eastern deciduous forest, dogwoods are now threatened by a blight, dogwood anthracnose, a fungal disease that has decimated dogwood populations in the northeast and is spreading across the continent. While dogwood’s flowery exhibition reminds us spring is here to stay for this year, we can only hope that the flowering dogwood is not another passing memory from American forests.