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| Photo Credit: Gerald Klingaman |
| Cornelian cherry blooms early, so locate it where the flowers can be inspected and enjoyed up close. |
With the arrival of spring come the first tentative blossoms. For trees, the earliest flowers come from the red maples and Cornelian cherries. These early bloomers begin their show about two weeks before the always-early deciduous magnolias.
Despite what its name may suggest, Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) isn’t a cherry tree at all – it’s a type of dogwood. Though not especially common, it’s easy to grow and makes a good show, given that competition is scarce in February and early March. It’s native to southern Europe and central Asia. All plants have a plethora of names associated with them, and tracing back the derivation of each is an interesting exercise when the weather is too foul for gardening. With regard to Cornelian cherry, the name “cornelian” is an adaptation of “cornel,” the name used by the Romans for this tree. The Latin word “cornu” describes hard and tough objects, such as the horn of a goat. From this root word we get “cornea” (due to the toughness of the lens of the eye), “cornet” (the shape of the instrument resembles the trunk shape) and Cornus, which Carolus Linnaeus, founder of the “binomial system of nomenclature,” used when he established the genus name for dogwoods. The species epitaph “mas” is a Latin prefix meaning “strong,” a reference to the hard, tough wood of the species. This prefix is used in the word “masculine;” in fact, in some writings, Linnaeus used the Latin name Cornus mascula for Cornelian cherry, but he used C. mas first, so that’s the official name. The etymology of the word “dogwood,” used for our native C. florida, is not completely clear. One possibility is that it comes from the Middle English word “dag,” referring to a wooden spit made from a shrubby dogwood native to England. These spits were sold on the streets for cooking meat over an open flame.
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