Handsome, charming and eccentric plant hunter David Douglas was the first European to make the perilous trek across the Rocky Mountains in 1826. After setting up his base camp in Fort Vancouver, Douglas spent the next two years diligently collecting specimens up and down the coast and into the interior. His adventures were the stuff of legend: once his canoe was caught in a whirlpool on the Fraser River and he was spun for almost two hours. He called his survival a miracle.

His eccentricities made him almost as famous as his botanical achievements. Every now and then, between risking life and limb to explore the flora of British Columbia, he would give in to the impulse to don his complete suit of Royal Stuart tartan. As this is not what you would call a subdued pattern, his native crew were kept well entertained watching the impression he made on local inhabitants.

Along with giving his name to the Douglas Fir, he was responsible for sending hundreds of seeds and plant specimens back to the Royal Horticultural Society and English gardens everywhere. One plant he didn’t collect seeds from was the Pacific Dogwood. In an uncharacteristic mistake, Douglas mis-identified the plant as the Eastern Dogwood which had already been collected a few years earlier in Virginia.
A decade later his mistake was corrected by botanist and ornithologist Thomas Nuttall. He caught the subtle difference: the flowers of the Eastern Dogwood have four white bracts (petal-like leaves surrounding the tiny greenish flower-clusters in the centre), while Pacific Dogwood has five.

Nuttall sent his friend, John James Audubon, a specimen of the Band-tailed Pigeon along with his notes that the bird’s favorite food was the fruit of the Pacific Dogwood. In his famous Birds of America, Audubon features the band-tailed pigeon perched on a Pacific dogwood branch. He also named the plant cornus nuttallii in honour of his friend.

Both the common name Dogwood, and the Latin name cornus refer to the hardness of this very close-grained wood. ‘Dag’ comes from dagger which got corrupted into dog-wood and cornu means hard. Dogwood has long been used in making tool handles, loom shuttles, bows, spears, hooks, combs, knitting needles and baby baskets.

The strength of Dogwood even wove its way into legend: this is the wood that Christ’s cross was made of. After his son died, God transformed the tall, stately Dogwood tree into a dwarf with a gnarled, twisting trunk so that it would never again be used to hang a man. He also gave it four-petalled white flowers with a reddish centre to symbolize the blood of Christ.

For First Nations people along the Pacific coast, this plant was an important food, fiber and medicine. The bark also produced excellent black and brown dyes, the berries were used for ceremonies and the leaves were occasionally dried and added to tobacco for smoking. British Columbia’s Nlaka'pamux First Nation used the flowers of the Pacific Dogwood as a wash to treat that eternal complaint – the seven-year-itch.
Today the Pacific Dogwood is used extensively for land reclamation projects. Because it likes the moist soils of stream banks and flood plains, planting these trees along erosion-threatened rivers has helped stabilize and restore areas that were in jeopardy.

But the time has come to pay back some of what the Pacific Dogwood has given to us. Today this tree is seriously threatened by a fungal disease called anthracnose. So far the best treatment for the disease is to keep the trees as healthy and stress-free as possible. This means little to no pruning or cutting, ensuring the right amount of shade to prevent sunscald on the trunk and ensuring good drainage in the soil.