Cornus racemosaLam.

gray dogwood

WFO wfo-0000924819 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Cornus racemosa, photographed by Howard Williams
fig. a Howard Williams, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205233773
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Ryan Sorrells
fig. b Ryan Sorrells, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203408462
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Patrick Hanly
fig. c Patrick Hanly, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156290314
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Glenn Berry
fig. d Glenn Berry, CC0 1.0 / obs. 157912557
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. e Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 171212148
Cornus racemosa, photographed by sudomir
fig. f sudomir, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 154272498
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Matt Pelikan
fig. g Matt Pelikan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 156431963
Cornus racemosa, photographed by Larry Jensen
fig. h Larry Jensen, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152805680

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 745 observations

Peak flowering in Jun, from 745 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 13 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Cornus albida Ehrh.
  • Cornus comosa Raf.
  • Cornus foemina subsp. racemosa (Lam.) J.S.Wilson
  • Cornus gracilis Koehne
  • Cornus paniculata L'Hér.
  • Cornus paniculata var. albida (Ehrh.) Pursh
  • Cornus paniculata var. radiata Pursh
  • Cornus racemosa f. caeruleocarpa Oswald
  • Cornus racemosa f. nielsenii J.W.Moore
  • Swida candidissima Small
  • Swida gracilis (Koehne) Soják
  • Swida racemosa (Lam.) Moldenke
  • Thelycrania racemosa (Lam.) D.Löve & J.-P.Bernard

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.