Cornus nuttallii Pacific dogwood

Eddie’s White Wonder dogwood at the History Corner. Sairus Patel, 27 Apr 2023

True flowers of Cornus ×transamericana ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’, crowded at the center of the showy white bracts, Amy J. Blue Garden. Robert Siegel, 23 Nov 2019

One of our loveliest flowering natives, with spreading white petal-like bracts and bright red or orange fruit clusters that led botanist Thomas Nuttall (1786–1839) to mistake it for a magnolia at first glance. He recognized it as a new species, and noted its autumn fruit was the favored food of the band-tailed pigeon. His friend John James Audubon, when painting that bird for his Birds of America, set a pair among branches of C. nuttallii – and named the tree in Nuttall’s honor.

Campus residents usually encounter it in Yosemite or along the road to Tahoe, but there is a small enclave around Ben Lomond near Santa Cruz, where it grows quite prolifically, reaching heights of 70 feet along the San Lorenzo River. Its bark is smooth and dappled gray, and the fall color handsome. Shrubby indigenous specimens were once reported from northeastern San Francisco, but are now long extinct.

Sadly, it does not do well in cultivation, and nurseries more often supply a hybrid with the eastern dogwood (C. florida), recently named, appropriately, C. ×transamericana. The cultivar ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’, slender and with gracefully drooping branch-ends, is virtually the only selection available. A row is on the east side of the Allen Building. A pair stands at the edge of the Amy J. Blue Garden next to Memorial Church. Newer plantings are at CoDa and the north side of the Biomedical Innovations Building.

At Jasper Ridge may be seen the shrubby brown dogwood (C. glabrata) and red osier dogwood (C. sericea), with its red twigs and white fruit clusters. Their flowers are borne in delicate branched clusters, rather than surrounded by large, showy bracts.

Name derivation: Cornus – Latin name for C. mas; nuttallii – see text above.