Dogwood
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Dogwood. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a family of flowering shrubs or trees. The common dogwood of Europe appears to be of value--its wood for charcoal, its berries for oil. There are several American dogwoods; they are as often called cornel. Two are quite showy in flower. The inconspicuous flowers are in a close head surrounded by a whorl of showy white leaves that one would naturally suppose to be the petals of the flower itself. One of these showy cornels is a dwarf about six inches high which in June carpets the low grounds of the Northern woods with white. A cluster of red berries follows later. The other showy cornel is the flowering dogwood of upland forests from Ontario to Texas. The leaves that surround the flower cluster are white, broad, heartshaped at the apex and open up three or four inches across. They are followed by handsome clusters of red berries that add brilliancy to the foliage of autumn. The other cornels are hard to tell apart. They bear flat clusters of white flowers. The purple bark of the Kinni-kinic was much used by the Northern Indians as a substitute for smoking tobacco. The bright red-purple shrubs of another kind give it the name of red osier dogwood.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a common name for plants of the genus Cornus, but more especially applied to C. sanguinea. The wood is hard, and is sometimes used for butchers' skewers, toothpicks, etc. The fruit is black, about the size of a currant, very bitter, and yields an oil used in France for burning in lamps and for soapmaking. The following are the best known varieties: 1. Cornus florida is a common American shrub, growing 6-10 feet in height, and bearing beautiful white clusters of flowers, enlivening the hedges and bush of the warmer portion of the United States. It is productive of a bark much valued as an antiperiodic in ague, etc., and its wood, which is hard, white, and close grained, is useful in various ways. One unique use of its small branches is to form tooth-brushes with which women in some of the Southern States "dip" snuff. 2. Euonymus europeus. Loudon says, "It is called dogwood because a decoction of its leaves was used to wash dogs to free them from vermin"; and this derivation receives some support from another of its synonyms, louse-berry tree.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The botany here still holds — the showy white "leaves" of Aiton's flowering dogwood are indeed bracts, not petals — but two things have moved sharply. Since about 1978 a fungal disease, dogwood anthracnose (Discula destructiva), has killed flowering dogwoods (Cornus florida) across the eastern United States and Pacific dogwoods in the Northwest, so the tree that Collier's in 1921 saw "enlivening the hedges" is now much thinned in the wild and planted mostly as disease-resistant cultivars. Collier's recommendation of the bark as "an antiperiodic in ague" — a quinine substitute against malaria — has been wholly abandoned by medicine. And Aiton's six-inch dwarf cornel, the bunchberry, turned out to be a record-holder: high-speed filming published in 2005 showed its flowers fling pollen open in under half a millisecond, among the fastest movements known in plants.
Written for this edition, 2026.