Est. 1998 — 27 years of woodworking knowledge
Re: domestic apple - handle omnibus...
William Duffield
If you are interested, I think I can rustle up some dogwood for you. It's not big enough for plane blanks but sufficient for chisel, file, rasp and gouge handles, marking knives, awls, scraper burnishers, bow saw handles, etc. How much can you use? I think I still have a couple blanks that have been drying in my shop loft for about 14 years.
I'll look bad....
David Weaver
If I take any dogwood. I think about half a dozen people have offered me some, and silly me, I thought someone would just offer stems or logs for cheap on ebay. It's apparently not marketed much due to cracking and high volumetric shrinkage.
I'll go back through the group in order else I look like the jerk that I really am!!
Kind of surprised there's so little of it out there - sort of like apple. Tons of apple chopped into little bits for smoking meat and if the stems or limbs would've been kept in their original size, I'd imagine there would be a market of wood turners who would buy it. Not a big enough one, I guess.
Re: I'll look bad....
William Duffield
We've all seen pictures of your chisels. THEY don't look bad, and that's what is important! Also, you do good work and document it lucidly for us, which everyone here thinks is invaluable, thus the offers.
The problem with dogwood availability is a fungus disease called Anthracnose. Except for certain cultivated resistant varieties of pink dogwood (e.g., "Cherokee…", most of the wild dogwood around here has been wiped out. To demonstrate that to yourself, go take a ride in country in the Spring when the dogwoods are in bloom. All along the edges of the woods where they used to bloom prolifically, the white flowered trees are now few and far between, and fewer every year. I have dibs on one that is dying across the street. I already have a third of it which had already croaked. I don't expect the rest of the tree to survive the summer, and I will harvest it as well. But the trunk is only 6" diameter even at the base, and the first crotch is less than a foot off the ground, so it doesn't have any large diameter turning stock.
The guys who take care of the landscaping over there know I want it. The only issue is the smaller trunk that I have was standing dead for several years and has a lot of spalting, which changes the character of the handles you can turn from it. I have an Iwasaki side float I need to put a handle on, so I'm going to try the spalted dogwood first, maybe this afternoon. Well, maybe not today: The remote thermometer tells me it is 34°F out in the shop now, and the weather radar tells me sleet and freezing rain are bearing down on us. Masybe you could talk to Punxsutawney Phil about six more weeks of Winter. He lives somewhere out your way, doesn't he? 
Dog does split a lot, especially if you don't immediately process it to remove the pith and slather AnchorSeal on the end grain. That is not a serious limitation when you are using it for tool handles, shuttles for looms, carvers' mallets or gluts, because the branches usually split into only two or three sections, all the way to the pith, leaving you in many cases with inch or inch and a quarter turning blanks. I've turned two carving mallets from large trunks, but even when you have a whole tree to work with, you often don't find any part of the trunk of sufficient diameter (about eight inches) or length to extract stock for a mallet or two.
Also, dogwoods are slow growing understory trees, where they often get other trees and large branches dropped on them, so you find a lot of them tilted, bent, and broken, not in the best condition for woodworking stock.
Dogwood
Warren in Lancaster, PA
In 1975 you could drive down the Pennsylvania turnpike in March and see a hillside with a dozen dogwoods. They flower before trees leaf out. Now you are lucky to see one tree. The horticultural varieties, both white and pink, have some fungal resistance and they often have the benefit of full sun, which keeps off the dampness.
I like dogwood for mallets, but for chisel handle I prefer beech, apple and ash, all of which absorb shock better than dogwood, hickory or boxwood or other woods that are very hard. You can feel the difference with a lot of chopping. Also beech and apple for saw handles are more comfortable than some hard lively wood.
I hadn't noticed
David Weaver
There's a nice dogwood tree next door to me, but it's in full sun. My mother's got some in her yard, but it's at least partial sun and not under a canopy like trees would be for most of the year at the edge of a mature fence row.
agree on the musicality of wood. A couple of samples that I've gotten to turn and try for handles (katalox and gombeira) are really sharp sounding, but not with the mallet that I normally use (a round urethane mallet).