Smooth sumac
Rhus glabra
Tropical-looking ferny foliage that turns the most saturated scarlet in the native flora, with velvet-red berry cones that carry birds through winter. A colony, not a specimen: give it a rough corner and room.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green · Bronze, red and brown
- Flower color
- Red
- Sunlight
- Full sun
- Watering
- Low
- Soil
- Any drained soil, the poorer the better behaved
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 3a–9a
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 8 ft 2 in
- In-row spacing
- 6 ft 7 in
- Between rows
- 9 ft 10 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, shallow, wide and opportunistic
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3.5 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 30–39 ft across, about 3–4× the width of the plant
These roots go looking, and what they find is drains, soakaways, footings, paving and the border next door. Give it real distance from anything you would mind being lifted or blocked: the reach below ground is several times what the crown suggests.
Root suckers form a spreading colony around the parent, and cutting the stems provokes more of them. It is a fine plant for a bank you have given up on and a poor one anywhere near a lawn.
The habit is Smooth 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
- The red berry cones in late summer for sumac-ade, before heavy rains wash their coating off.
- What to look for
- Cones fully red and velvety, tart on the tongue when touched. After a week of rain they are handsome but flavorless.
- How to harvest
- Cut whole cones, swish and soak them in cold water for a few hours, then strain through cloth and sweeten: pink lemonade. Never hot water, which pulls tannin and bitterness.
- How often
- Once, in August or September. The colony itself gets its edges mowed twice a season, which is the real chore.
- Storing the crop
- Whole dry cones keep for months somewhere airy. The drink is best the day it is made. Dried and ground, the berries are the sour crimson spice on every Middle Eastern table.
- Rust Rust on the leaflets some years
- Suckers rise a stride from the clump every year; mow the edges or trench around it
The only shrub native to all 48 contiguous states. The red berry cones, steeped in cold water, make a lemonade the Plains nations drank long before lemons arrived; the white-berried plant in the swamp is the unrelated poison sumac, and the red cones are the tell.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com