THE SUMACHS
The sumach family contains more than fifty genera, confined for the most part to the warmer regions of the globe. Two fruit trees within this family are the mango and the pistachio nut tree. Commercially important also is the turpentine tree of southern Europe. The Japanese lacquer tree yields the black varnish used in all lacquered wares. The cultivated sumachs of southern Europe are important in the tanning industry, their leaves containing from twenty-five to thirty per cent. of tannic acid.
In the flora of the United States three genera of the family have tree representatives. The genus Rhus, with a total of one hundred and twenty species, stands first. Most of these belong to South Africa; sixteen to North America where their distribution covers practically the entire continent. Of these, four attain the habit of small trees.
Fleshy roots, pithy branchlets, and milky, or sometimes caustic or watery juice, belong to the sumachs, which are oftenest seen as roadside thickets or fringing the borders of woods. The foliage is fernlike, odd-pinnate, rarely simple. The flowers are conspicuous by their crowding into terminal or axillary panicles, followed by bony fruits, densely crowded like the flowers.
The Staghorn Sumach
Rhus hirta, Sudw.
The staghorn sumach is named for the densely hairy, forking branchlets, which look much like the horns of a stag "in the velvet." The foliage and fruit are also densely clothed with stiff pale hairs, usually red or bright yellow.
The leaves reach two feet in length, with twenty or thirty oblong, often sickle-shaped leaflets, set opposite on the stem, and terminating in a single odd leaflet. Bright yellow-green until half grown, dark green and dull above when mature, often nearly white on the under surface, these leaves turn in autumn to bright scarlet, shading into purple, crimson, and orange. No sunset was ever more changeful and glorious than a patch of staghorn sumach that covers the ugliness of a railroad siding in October. After the leaves have fallen, the dull red fuzzy fruits persist, offering food to belated bird migrants and gradually fading to browns before spring.
The maximum height of this largest of northern sumachs is thirty-five feet. The wood of such large specimens is sometimes used for walking-sticks and for tabourets and such fancy work as inlaying. Coarse, soft, and brittle, it is satiny when polished, and attractively streaked with orange and green. The young shoots are cut and their pith contents removed to make pipes for drawing maple sap from the trees in sugaring time.
But the best use of the tree is for ornamental planting. In summer, the ugliness of the most unsightly bank is covered where this tree is allowed to run wild and throw up its root suckers unchecked. The mass effect of its fernlike foliage in spring is superb, when the green is lightened by the fine clusters of pink blossoms. No tree carries its autumn foliage longer nor blazes with greater splendor in the soft sunshine of the late year. The hairy staghorn branches, bared of leaves, hold aloft their fruits like lighted candelabra far into the waning winter. For screens and border shrubs this sumach may become objectionable, by reason of its habit of spreading by suckers as well as seed.