Nobody’s quite sure where the name “dogwood” comes from. One suggestion is that it was originally Dagwood, because the hard wood was used for making dags, a kind of skewer. That doesn’t seem very likely though, because another name for it was Hound’s Tree – so there definitely seems to be a connection with dogs. Wherever the name came from it was being used by 1614 at the latest.

An older name for the Eurasian dogwood is “whippletree”. Geoffrey Chaucer used this name in The Canterbury Tales, written around the end of the 14th century. A whippletree is part of the hitching mechanism of a horse-drawn cart, so either the part was named after the tree it was carved from, or the tree was named after what its wood was used for. ~ The Tree Centre

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