I prefer to call this species the Smooth Viburnum, as it is normally hairless and smooth, except for some hairiness on young twigs for awhile. It gets the name of "arrowwood" because it bears some very straight stems that were used by natives for arrows. Its native range is from coastal Massachusetts down the East Coast into northern Florida then to most of Louisiana and a spot of east Texas; inland areas of southeast Pennsylvania, much of Ohio, eastern Kentucky & Tennessee & north Georgia, and a spot in Arkansas and one in Missouri, growing in bogs, bottomlands, and along watercourses. It grows about 1.5 feet/year. Its sort of rounded leaves with big teeth get to about 4.5 inches long by 4 inches wide and develop a fall color from pale yellow to orange to red to red-purple. Several cultivars have in recent times been selected for better fall color and for being less leggy than the mother species. The creamy white flower clusters get to 5 inches wide and have a slight stinky smell. The bluish-black to black fruit are oval-rounded drupes borne in fall and greatly loved by birds. The birds do seed some plants around in my yard and I have dug up such seedlings and given them to the neighbors. This is a reliable, basically neat, clean plant that is used somewhat commonly to commonly by landscape designers, and even a few homeowners buy some to be screens in their yards. There are a few very similar species to this that I have hardly ever seen, but they are the Bracted Arrowwood (V. bracteatum), the Downy Arrowwood (V. rafinesquianum), and the Kentucky Arrowwood (V. molle).

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