5. Cornus foemina Mill. (gray dogwood, stiff dogwood)

Map 1610, Pl. j

Plants shrubs or small trees 2–5 m tall, often colonial. Twigs reddish brown to tan or brown when young, becoming olive green, grayish brown, or gray with age, glabrous or sparsely appressed-hairy, the pith white or tan. Bark smooth or with shallow fissures, the ridges becoming divided into thin, irregular plates, gray to grayish brown, sometimes with small, slightly raised, lighter dots. Leaves opposite, usually relatively evenly dispersed along the branches, the petiole 0.5–1.0 cm long. Leaf blades (3–)5–12 cm long, 2–7 cm wide, broadly lanceolate to elliptic or ovate, rounded, angled, or short-tapered at the base, tapered to a sharply pointed tip, the surfaces glabrous or sparsely to moderately pubescent with mostly appressed, straight, T-shaped hairs, the undersurface sometimes with microscopic white papillae and slightly roughened to the touch, the lateral veins 3 or 4(5) pairs, these relatively evenly spaced. Inflorescences either hemispherical to pyramidal panicles or appearing more or less umbellate and flat-topped to shallowly convex, the bracts absent, the flower stalks 2–5 mm long, glabrous or sparsely hairy, becoming reddish brown to purplish brown as the fruits mature. Sepals 0.4–1.0 mm long. Petals 2–4 mm long, narrowly oblong-lanceolate, white to cream-colored, rarely greenish-tinged. Style 2–3 mm long, relatively slender, not broadened toward the tip. Fruits 4–7 mm in diameter, spherical, white or light blue, rarely white-and-blue mottled. Stone strongly longitudinally veined but smooth or shallowly and inconspicuously grooved. 2n=22. May–July.

Scattered nearly throughout the state but absent from most of the Unglaciated Plains Division (eastern U.S. west to North Dakota and Texas; Canada). Swamps, bottomland forests, mesic upland forests in ravines, banks of streams and rivers, margins of ponds, lakes, and sinkhole ponds, bases of bluffs, fens, acid seeps, and edges of bottomland and upland prairies; also fencerows, old fields, ditches, railroads, and roadsides.

Wilson (1965) treated the C. foemina complex as comprising three subspecies that some other botanists have considered separate species. The two Missouri taxa, ssp. foemina and ssp. racemosa, are southern and northern analogs whose ranges overlap in southern Missouri, where Wilson recorded apparently fertile putative hybrids. The third subspecies, ssp. microcarpa (Nash) J.S. Wilson (C. asperifolia Michx.), inhabits portions of the Coastal Plain from Florida north to North Carolina and west to Alabama and differs in its relatively strongly roughened twigs and leaves and often slightly smaller fruits. Wilson also reported apparently sterile hybrids between C. foemina and both C. amomum and C. drummondii, which are discussed briefly in the treatments of those species. Steyermark (1963), who also noted possible hybridization between C. foemina ssp. racemosa (as C. racemosa) and C. amomum ssp. obliqua (as C. obliqua), referred to such plants under the name C. arnoldiana Rehder.

Some botanists (Gleason and Cronquist, 1991; Murrell, 1992) have used the name C. stricta in place of C. foemina because the original description of C. foemina was ambiguous, possibly referring to ssp. foemina or to ssp. racemosa. However, Wilson (1965) argued that the original materials from which the name was described were cultivated from plants growing in a region and habitat where only ssp. foemina grows today, and he accepted the name C. foemina for the species.