Cornelian Cherry Cornus mas
Cornelian Cherry is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 26 ft and blooms Apr in full sun – part shade, with red fruit.
More about this plant
Cornelian cherry, also known as the European cornel, is a species of shrub or small tree in the dogwood family Cornaceae native to Western Europe, Southern Europe, and Southwestern Asia. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5–7.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 26 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 16 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 6–12 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Red persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- 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 · 22 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.
22 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Cornelian Cherry — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 70 birds · 6 mammals · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Cornelian Cherry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 70 birds and 6 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
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 (38) 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).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…