Among dogwoods there are two semi-herbaceous dwarf species that send their woody stems horizontally under litter and produce clones of low annual shoots--"herbaceous plants" whose stems are woody only at the very bottom. Both species are distributed in the Old and New World (circumpolar, with disjunct range). C. canadensis has three separate areas of distribution in the forests of East Asia and northwestern and northeastern North America. The other species is even more a northerner and grows in the tundra (it does not occur in Massachusetts). There are areas where ranges of the two dwarf cornels overlap, and there they can form hybrids.