Garden Plants - Dogwood

There are several versions of the name of this tree. The botanical name - cornus is said to come from cornus = horn in Latin. This is because the wood of the tree is exceptionally hard and dense and is reputed to be the material used to build the Trojan horse!

The term dogwood relates either to the name of a tool - the dag or dagge from the Celtic/Old Gaelic, daga, a pointed tool because daggewood could be fashioned into any form of pointed tools from leather punches to meat skewers and the wooden handle could be trusted not to split.

Alternatively, the berries are said to be the only food given to Odysseus's men when Circe turned them into pigs and in medieval herbals the tree is described as 'the Doggeberry tree, because the berries are not fit to be eaten, only given to a dogge'. But John Louden, writing in Victorian times, claims it was so named because the leaves could be used to make a decoction to wash fleas from dogs.

Dogwood had very special qualities, even beyond its hardness - because it wouldn't splinter regardless of the pressure put on it, it was fashioned into hay forks and mallets, cogwheels and pegs for grain mills, pulleys and wheel hubs, knitting needles and crochet hooks, spindles, bobbins, and other parts of spinning wheels, and forks, spoons, and bowls. Printers used small engraved blocks of dogwood for printing pictures. Drafting tools, rules and T-squares, were made of the hard and stable dogwood.

It had one other quality too - the bark contains minute amounts of quinine and American settlers discovered that using a dogwood twig as a primitive toothbrush helped them to ward off fevers.

Garden Dogwood photograph by Noel Lee, used under a creative commons attribution licence