Cornus hemsleyi C. K. Schneid. & Wangerin

Oil from the seeds is used in making soap. The leaves and bark are used as a source of industrial tannin.

Shrubs or small trees, 2–5 m tall. Bark reddish brown, brown, or dark gray; young branches red or green, later red, slightly 4-angled or rounded, glabrous or with soft appressed trichomes; old branches purplish red or deep brown, glabrous, with yellowish brown elliptic lenticels. Leaves opposite; leaf blade elliptic to ovate-elliptic or broadly ovate, 4.5–9.3(–13) × 1.8–4.8(–6.2) cm, papery, abaxially ± scabrous, densely papillate, pubescent with dense to sparse appressed short white trichomes, axils of veins sometimes with grayish and/or light brown long trichomes, veins 6–8, small veins conspicuously reticulate, base rounded or broadly cuneate to nearly cordate, sometimes slightly oblique, apex acuminate or shortly acuminate. Corymbose cymes flat to convex, 5–9 cm wide, pubescent with light brown short trichomes or nearly glabrous after anthesis. Pedicels 1–5.5 mm. Flowers white or yellowish, 6–7 (–8.5) mm in diam. Calyx lobes triangular, 0.4–1 mm, equal to or longer than disk. Petals ovate to oblong-lanceolate, 2.5–5 × 1.1–1.6 mm. Stamens longer than or rarely equal to petals; anthers grayish blue or grayish white or yellowish, ovoid-oblong. Style cylindrical or slightly expanded at apex, but not clavate, 1.8–4 mm; stigma subcapitate, broader than style, not or slightly 1–4-lobed. Fruit purplish red or black, globose, 4–5 mm in diam.; stones globose, vertically compressed, 2.3–3.1 × 1.8–2.5 mm, inconspicuously 8-ribbed. Fl. Jun–Jul, fr. Aug–Sep.

Gansu, Guizhou, Hebei, Henan, Hubei, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Sichuan, Xizang, Yunnan.

Mixed forests, thickets, streamsides; 1000–4000 m.