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| The widely cultivated flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) of eastern North America |
The name "dog-tree" entered the English vocabulary by 1548, and had been
further transformed to "dogwood" by 1614. Once the name dogwood was
affixed to this kind of tree, it soon acquired a secondary name as the
Hound's Tree, while the fruits came to be known as
dogberries or
houndberries (the latter a name also for the berries of black nightshade) alluding to Hecate's hounds). Another theory advances the view that "dogwood" was derived from the Old English
dagwood, from the use of the slender stems of its very hard wood for making "dags" (daggers, skewers, and arrows)
. Another, earlier name of the dogwood in English is the
whipple-tree. Geoffrey Chauser uses "whippletree" in
The Canterbury Tales ("The Knights Tale", verse 2065) to refer to the dogwood. A
whippletree is an element of the traction of a horse-drawn cart
linking the drawpole of the cart to the harnesses of the horses in
file; these items still bear the name of the tree from which they are
commonly carved.
