Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina): Antlers in Velvet at the Southern Edge

Plant Highlights · Staghorn Sumac · Southeast

A shrub of northern old fields and Appalachian roadsides that reaches the southern limit of the range in the hills above us: velvet antlers in winter, fire in October, and a tart red drink from fruit nobody else wants.

7 min read · By Fiona von Grey · Aiken, South Carolina

I.Antlers in velvet

Run a hand along a young branch of staghorn sumac in winter and the name explains itself. The stout, forking twigs are clothed in a dense coat of reddish-brown hair, soft as the velvet on a young buck's antlers, and with the leaves gone the whole shrub reads as a rack of antlers raised against the sky. The botanical name catches the same likeness: the epithet typhina means "like Typha," the cattail, for the velvety young branches, and the old synonym Rhus hirta simply means "hairy sumac."

That fur is also the surest field mark. Smooth sumac, Rhus glabra, carries the same tropical-looking leaves and the same upright red fruit, but the twigs are bare and waxy; where the two grow together they cross freely, and the hybrid has a botanical name, Rhus × pulvinata. Neither should be confused with poison sumac, Toxicodendron vernix, a plant of bogs and swamps with smooth-edged leaflets and loose, drooping clusters of white fruit. Red and upright means a true sumac. White and hanging, in standing water, means keep walking.

We gave the whole genus a survey in A Field Guide to the Sumacs. This piece is about one species, and one question that guide only touched on: what a northern sumac does in a Southern garden.

II.A northerner at the southern edge

Staghorn sumac is the sumac of the North. The native range runs from the Maritime provinces, Quebec and Ontario west to Minnesota, and south through the Appalachians to a ragged edge in central Illinois, western Tennessee, northern Alabama, northern Georgia and the northwestern corner of South Carolina. The shrub climbs to nearly five thousand feet in the mountains and favors dry, rocky or gravelly ground: old fields, roadsides, railway banks and forest edges, anywhere with full sun and no competition from shade.

So the plant is a South Carolina native, but an upcountry one. Aiken sits below the fall line, outside the wild range, and gardeners here are growing staghorn sumac at the warm end of the hardiness scale. Missouri Botanical Garden and most northern extension services rate the species to zone 8; North Carolina State stretches that to 9b. The honest summary is this: the shrub is fully hardy in the coastal plain and the Piedmont, and the fall color is strongest where nights turn cool in October, so give the plant the hottest, driest, sunniest ground you have rather than a sheltered damp spot, and expect a colony a little less exuberant than one on a Pennsylvania roadside.

III.The crimson cones

Staghorn sumac is dioecious: male and female flowers sit on separate plants. Both sexes bloom from May into July, earlier in the south of the range, carrying dense panicles of small greenish-yellow flowers that hum with bees. Only the females go on to fruit, and the fruit is the point. Each flower ripens into a small drupe coated in short red hairs, and the drupes pack into an upright, cone-shaped cluster up to eight inches tall, ripe by September and standing on the bare branches through the whole winter.

The birds are in no hurry for them. Sumac fruit ranks low in feeding preference, and a New York study found the clusters among the last of four native shrubs to be eaten; bobwhite fed on sumac alone did poorly. That makes the cones what wildlife biologists call a food of last resort, which is a more valuable thing than the phrase suggests. The cones are still there in late winter, after the dogwood and holly fruit is long gone, and wild turkey, bobwhite and pheasant are all recorded feeding on them, along with many songbirds. The foliage also feeds caterpillars of the luna moth and the spring azure, and fallen leaves under a colony host the red-banded hairstreak.

IV.Sumac-ade and the long human record

Lick a ripe cluster in September and the hairs taste sour, a clean bright tartness that comes chiefly from malic acid, the same acid that makes a green apple pucker. Steep the clusters in cool water, strain through a cloth to catch the hairs, and the result is a pink, lemony drink. Daniel Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany records the custom among the Algonquin, Menominee and Ojibwa, and the Ojibwa sweetened the drink with maple sugar. The Menominee and Ojibwa also dried the fruit for winter, and the Cherokee ate the berries.

The record runs well past the kitchen. Moerman lists more than fifty uses of staghorn sumac. The Cherokee drew red and black dyes from the berries, the Menominee a yellow from the roots, and the Ojibwa an orange from the inner bark mixed with bloodroot. The Mohegan, Potawatomi, Micmac and Ojibwa used the plant as a gargle for sore throats. These are records of traditional practice, not medical advice. The famous culinary sumac of the Middle East, ground over kebabs and blended into za'atar, is a cousin, Rhus coriaria, from the eastern Mediterranean. We wrote about the medicinal side of our native woody plants in Physic in the Hedgerow.

V.Growing a colony on purpose

Here is the thing to know before you plant one: staghorn sumac does not stay a single shrub. Most wild colonies begin as one seedling that spreads by root sprouts into a dense clonal thicket, and Missouri Botanical Garden describes the species as probably too weedy for a mixed border. The same habit has carried the plant onto invasive and banned lists in parts of Europe, Switzerland among them. In the shrub's native country the habit is a gift, if you give the colony the right ground: a dry, sunny slope that needs holding, a hot strip by a road or drive, the rough edge of a meadow, or a corner of poor sandy soil where little else will grow. We made the case for that kind of ground in Gardening in Sand.

Staghorn sumac grows fast, takes drought, salt spray and road runoff, and asks nothing of the soil but drainage. Full sun gives the densest colony and the strongest color; the shrub tolerates part shade but thins out under trees. Plant one female for the cones, and accept that you will not know the sex of a seedling-grown plant until the first bloom.