A number of alien species of the Eurasian genus Cotoneaster are naturalising in Central Europe. Based on a concept by Dickoré & Kasperek (2010), this scratchpad provides a key and synopsis of the Cotoneaster species indigenous to, naturalising or commonly cultivated in Central Europe. Many of the 500+ binomials published by earlier authors, including a substantial proportion of those based on cultivated material, seem to be poorly defined, both morphologically and chorologically. Of an estimated total of only 50–70 Cotoneaster species worldwide, about 20, mainly chinese species have been found escaping from cultivation in Central Europe.