In early spring the flowering dogwood — the one that grows wild in eastern American woods — opens what look like four wide white petals, before its leaves are even out. Nurseries raise dogwoods and sell them as small trees. In USDA’s 2024 count of greenhouse and nursery crops, 32 states have a printed dollar figure for dogwood sales; 12 more are hidden behind the withheld mark, and 6 states have no dogwood line at all. Put these three in order, most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→3 in order
Easy one! The dogwood is Virginia’s state flower and its state tree. North Carolina picked it too. So the answer is… hold on. Where are they? They are not even on the list! 🐾
2Answer
The order USDA printed is…
Tennessee — $10,586,804 of dogwood trees sold, more than a quarter of the $39,620,565 USDA counted for the whole country, and about 1.97× second-place Oregon. Those top two are national places: everything USDA did not print adds up to $4,461,489, less than Oregon’s figure, so no hidden state can climb past either of them. Third place is a place among the printed states only. Now the part Biscuit got wrong. Four states have written the dogwood into their symbols, and the state at the top of this list is not one of them. Virginia’s state code lists the American Dogwood as both the state flower and the state tree. Missouri’s statute declares the flowering dogwood “the arboreal emblem of Missouri” — its state tree. North Carolina State University’s extension says the dogwood is “the state flower of North Carolina.” And third-place New Jersey has a dogwood of its own: New Jersey Legislative Services says a concurrent resolution of 1951 made the dogwood the State Memorial Tree, for the trees planted along a memorial highway “in honor of the men and women in our Armed Forces.” Among the states USDA printed, North Carolina is fourth ($2,609,124), Virginia fifth ($1,602,503) and Missouri twentieth ($199,960). Tennessee? Tennessee’s own state symbols page gives the state tree to the tulip poplar and the state cultivated flower to the iris. The state with the biggest dogwood sales never made one a symbol at all. One more turn. USDA has a wider line that adds up every deciduous flowering tree a nursery sells — cherries, crabapples, magnolias, redbuds, dogwoods and the rest. In that line Oregon is first in the country at $86,807,990, and Tennessee is fourth at $31,215,370. Across USDA’s flowering-tree line as a whole, Tennessee is not the leader. At the dogwood, it is. And the thing everyone calls the flower is not one. North Carolina State University’s Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, writing about the flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), says: “The showy dogwood ‘flower’ is actually a cluster of small, true flowers surrounded by four petal-like bracts.” The four white parts are modified leaves. The real flowers are the little knot in the middle. USDA does not split its line by species: it counts the dogwoods a nursery sells as flowering trees, whichever kind they are. This species is simply the one these sources describe, and the one at the centre of what happened next. Biscuit’s Field Note takes up two fungus diseases, and the researchers at the University of Tennessee who went looking for a dogwood the diseases had not ruined.
📚 BackgroundThe white “flower” on a flowering dogwood branch is not one flower, and the white parts are not petals. (USDA’s line does not split by species; the sources below describe the flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, the one native to eastern North America.) North Carolina State University’s Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox puts it in one sentence: “The showy dogwood ‘flower’ is actually a cluster of small, true flowers surrounded by four petal-like bracts.” A bract is a modified leaf. The University of Tennessee’s UT Gardens says the same thing about the four white parts: they are “not petals at all. They are actually scales that become showy bracts.” The toolbox also describes where the tree lives — “a woody, deciduous, showy, understory tree in the dogwood family (Cornaceae) that is native from southeastern Canada through eastern North America to eastern Mexico” — and notes that it is “the state flower of North Carolina.” Neither page says why Tennessee’s growers take in more dogwood money than any other state’s. Neither does this quiz.(North Carolina State University Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, “Cornus florida (Flowering Dogwood)”; University of Tennessee, UT Gardens, “March 2017 Plant of the Month: Flowering Dogwood.” Quotations unchanged)↗ (opens in a new tab)
🐕Biscuit's fun facts
📚 Stated as fact by textbooks / public agencies
Dogwood wood is famously hard. The plant toolbox lists what people made from it: the wood is “hard, heavy, close grained and strong” and was “often used for textile shuttles and spools as well as handles for tools.” A shuttle is the piece that shoots back and forth across a loom, thousands of times a day, carrying the thread — a job that chews through soft wood. The same page says the plant “was used for medicinal purposes by Native Americans, as well as for carvings, looms, and disinfectant.” So the tree people now buy for two weeks of spring was, for a long time, a tree people wanted for the part you cannot see.
Stories travel with this tree, and the people who know it best say so out loud. UT Gardens, writing about the flowering dogwood, notes “much history and folklore behind Cornus florida from the Native Americans’ belief of ‘little dogwood people’ who served as protectors and guardians, to legend of its use in the crucifixion.” The page calls those things history and folklore, and then draws a line: “However, there are some things we know to be fact.” The facts it goes on to give are that the dogwood is native to Tennessee, and that the four white parts are not petals. That is a good habit to copy — tell the story, then say which part you can check.
Easy one! The dogwood is Virginia’s state flower and its state tree. North Carolina picked it too. So the answer is… hold on. Where are they? They are not even on the list! 🐾
3Compare
Dogwood trees sold by growers (dollars, 2024)
🇺🇸 United States (national)39,620,565 dollars
Tennessee#110,586,804 dollars
Most: Tennessee (10,586,804 dollars); smallest printed number: Kansas (3,099 dollars). USDA counted the trees as well as the money. In that second column Tennessee’s printed figure is 476,306 dogwood plants sold — but USDA held back more states there, and what it held back comes to 494,734, more than Tennessee’s own figure. So read that column as a printed number, never as a national place.
Note: dollars taken in during 2024 for dogwood trees raised and sold, from USDA’s five-yearly Census of Horticultural Specialties. This line is money, not a count of trees, and it counts only trees grown to be sold — not the wild dogwoods standing in the woods. The United States bar is USDA’s own national figure. USDA NASS. USDA printed a dogwood sales figure for 32 states. Twelve more — among them Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont and West Virginia — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual growers. Six states have no dogwood line in this table at all: Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi and Wyoming. Everything USDA did not print adds up to $4,461,489. That is less than second place, so the first two places here are national places; it is more than third place, so from third down the places shown are places among the printed states only. A withheld state is not the same as a state selling none, and a state with no line is not the same as a state with no dogwoods. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
USDA printed a dogwood sales figure for 32 states. Twelve more — among them Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont and West Virginia — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual growers. Six states have no dogwood line in this table at all: Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi and Wyoming. Everything USDA did not print adds up to $4,461,489. That is less than second place, so the first two places here are national places; it is more than third place, so from third down the places shown are places among the printed states only. A withheld state is not the same as a state selling none, and a state with no line is not the same as a state with no dogwoods. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (2024 (Census of Horticultural Specialties))
Sources
Data as of: 2024 (Census of Horticultural Specialties)
USDA NASS Quick Stats: DECIDUOUS FLOWERING TREES, DOGWOOD - SALES, MEASURED IN $, 2024 Census of Horticultural Specialties, by state↗ (opens in a new tab) (2026-09-21) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). USDA printed a dogwood sales figure for 32 states. Twelve more — among them Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont and West Virginia — carry the withheld mark (D), which USDA uses when printing a state’s number would give away information about individual growers. Six states have no line in this table at all: Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi and Wyoming. Everything USDA did not print adds up to $4,461,489 — less than second place — so the first two places here are national places. From third place down, the places shown are places among the printed states only. A withheld state is not the same as a state selling none, and a state with no line is not the same as a state with no dogwoods. This site re-runs those checks on every build.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick CENSUS / Census of Horticultural Specialties, year 2024, commodity DECIDUOUS FLOWERING TREES, short description DECIDUOUS FLOWERING TREES, DOGWOOD - SALES, MEASURED IN $, Total domain, and compare states.