United States / Grow / bunchberry dogwood

bunchberry dogwood

Cornus canadensis · Cornaceae · all Cornus records · also called Bunchberry · Wikipedia

Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Bunchberry is on-list in the evidence table. One row describes Cornus canadensis as low flammability, and another includes it among firewise plants when placement and maintenance are appropriate.

Those two guide entries leave the record limited evidence rather than presenting a species-specific burn result. The hardiness records add an applicable 2–6 range and an applicable 4a minimum in hardiness evidence.

The native occurrence documentation remains under range evidence. The page keeps related plants and the genus page as paths for comparison and taxonomic browsing without expanding the two source claims.

Form: groundcover
Mature height: ~0.5 ft
Light: Part sun
Water need: moderate
Rated in: Alaska; northeastern Minnesota

On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence: Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence: 2 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: Alaska; northeastern Minnesota
Maintenance

Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources

Protect Your Home from Wildfire — Fire Resistant Vegetation and Landscaping · Official scoped edition
- AK; partial normalized coverage · 2005-04-27
  Alaska Division of Forestry opens with the wildfire threat to Alaskans and publishes Alaska firewise-landscape examples. FireApproved publishes 58 exact source owners from its 60 taxon entries and holds the taxon-free fern label. State publication scope does not establish suitability for every Alaska climate, site, or home-ignition-zone placement.
Landscaping for Wildfire Defensible Space in Northeastern Minnesota (Firewise) · Official scoped edition
- Northeastern Minnesota (MN footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2017-01-01
  Dovetail applies the UF/IFAS flammability key to northeastern Minnesota natives and publishes placement for 38 exact source owners. FireApproved exposes those rows only as northeastern Minnesota regional context and preserves the 3-to-30-foot versus beyond-30-foot source placement.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AK, CO, CT, IA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MT, ND, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SD, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Native range: Current cited native range in AK, CO, CT, IA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MT, ND, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, PA, RI, SD, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness: 2 applicable cited hardiness statements overlap but have different boundaries; compare each complete source row.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
Broader regional context
Federal context

How to read this page

The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.

Native and introduced range evidence

These are exact U.S. botanical-area records from the cited range source. Native and introduced describe biogeographic relationship, not fire performance or planting approval. Doubtful and extinct rows stay visible but do not count as current presence.

Current native

29

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

29 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

Aleutian Is. (AK)
Alaska (AK)
Colorado (CO)
Connecticut (CT)
Iowa (IA)
Idaho (ID)
Illinois (IL)
Indiana (IN)
Massachusetts (MA)
Maryland (MD)
Maine (ME)
Michigan (MI)
Minnesota (MN)
Montana (MT)
North Dakota (ND)
New Hampshire (NH)
New Jersey (NJ)
New Mexico (NM)
New York (NY)
Ohio (OH)
Pennsylvania (PA)
Rhode I. (RI)
South Dakota (SD)
Virginia (VA)
Vermont (VT)
Washington (WA)
Wisconsin (WI)
West Virginia (WV)
Wyoming (WY)

The lossless worldwide derivative is retained once in the research corpus; object pages repeat only exact U.S. areas needed by the local lens. The JSON twin carries the same page assertions.

Plant hardiness evidence

These values describe the plant source. Your ZIP zone comes from the separate 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Whole-zone values stay whole-zone, and a single unresolved value is not treated as a tolerance range. Different source boundaries stay separate: overlapping statements are compared independently, while only ranges with no shared zone are called a conflict.

Landscaping for Wildfire Defensible Space in Northeastern Minnesota (Firewise) · record table-2-row-28 · 2017 · as of 2026-08-26

2–6 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated

Source taxon: Cornus canadensis · exact match.

Source location: Table 2 row 28, Hardiness Zones column.
USDA PLANTS Database — Plant Characteristics · record COCA13 · PLANTS Help Document 2022; characteristics cache retrieved 2026-08-23 · as of 2026-08-26

Minimum 4a · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band

Exact source measurement: -28°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.

Source taxon: Cornus canadensis · source identifier match.

Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 75161, Temperature, Minimum (°F).

Where its sources say to plant it

Placement rules below use each source's own distances or named zones, tied to its rating. They are not interchangeable with the directory's current Zone 0 guidance.

Landscaping for Wildfire Defensible Space in Northeastern…: plantable 3-30 ft from a building [Dovetail Partners planting distance] (with its recommendation)
Protect Your Home from Wildfire: Ground covers and perennials [Alaska DNR brochure sections] (with its recommendation)

The evidence

Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself (a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · Wikipedia · ITIS

Cornus canadensis (Bunchberry). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/cornus-canadensis/. Last verified 2026-08-23.