Fragrant sumac
Rhus aromatica
The bank-holder: a low, dense, rooting-where-it-touches native that clothes dry slopes no mower should visit, glossy three-part leaves going orange and scarlet in fall.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green · Bronze, red and brown
- Flower color
- Yellow
- Sunlight
- Full sun to part shade
- Watering
- Low
- Soil
- Any drained soil; poor, dry, rocky and sandy included
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 3a–9a
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 5 ft 11 in
- In-row spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- Between rows
- 6 ft 7 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 12–16 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
Suckers and layers freely into a broad low colony, which is what makes it such good bank cover and a nuisance at the front of a small border.
The habit is Fragrant sumac’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Not harvested. Shear or thin in early spring if the planting needs tidying.
- What to look for
- A bank planting gone thin in the middle, or edges wandering where they should not.
- How to harvest
- It takes shearing like a hedge plant: cut the whole mass back by half in March and it thickens up. Runners that root beyond their ground pull up easily while young.
- How often
- A spring shear every few years; edge patrol annually.
- Storing the crop
- Nothing to store. The fuzzy red berries on female plants go to the chipmunks and the winter birds.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
The crushed leaves smell of citrus and spice, and though it is a true Rhus, it is nothing like poison ivy: three leaflets, yes, but fuzzy red upright berries and no itch. Female plants feed chipmunks and thirty-some bird species.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com