Roughleaf Dogwood Cornus drummondii
Roughleaf Dogwood is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 20 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with white fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Cornus drummondii, commonly known as the roughleaf dogwood, is a small deciduous tree that is native primarily to the Great Plains and Midwestern regions of the United States. It is also found around the Mississippi River. It is uncommon in the wild, and is mostly found around forest borders. The roughleaf dogwood is used as a buffer strip around parking lots, in the median of highways and near the decks and patios of homes. It can grow to a height of 15 to 25 feet with a spread of 10 to 15 feet. The roughleaf dogwood flowers during the summer months. It produces near-white four-petaled flowers that are followed by small white fruits, which ripen from August to October. These dogwoods can form a dense thicket that is used as cover for wildlife. Over forty species of birds are known to feed on the fruits. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Height
- 20 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 17 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 5–6 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Rapid
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- White
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- High browsed readily
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~118 caterpillar species
Cornus supports ~118 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Cornus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 8 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Cornus is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
8 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Roughleaf Dogwood :
+ 2 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 7 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Roughleaf Dogwood — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
7 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Across 64 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Roughleaf Dogwood, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Cornus →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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