WHEN we bought our country cottage and its bit of land, many years ago now, even the most creative of estate agents would have found it hard to find flattering words to describe it. "With potential" might have been the best they could manage.
The cottage was in ruins and the land consisted of two small fields, bare and weedy. But it did have potential and the first thing we did to realise this potential, even before the deal was signed, was to plant a tree.
But restoring and extending the cottage took every penny we had, and a bit more. This meant that the budget for landscaping was a minus quantity. So I was delighted when a friend with a large garden in Dublin offered me some free tree seedlings.
A couple of them were strange hairy twigs with bits of root attached. I planted them at the edge of the yard and they grew, quite rapidly, into stag’s horn sumacs.
I am reminded of this because the trees, now mature, are a blaze of colour at present. The long multiple leaves are yellow, orange and crimson, and there are even some purple tints. I know of no common tree that will grow in this country that produces better autumn colours.
The species is native to the east of Canada and the United States, including the Appalachian Mountains, and is a major contributor to the famous fall colours that tourists travel to admire. It’s not a big tree — it will grow to a height of maybe 10m but is more commonly half that size — but it has many virtues.
Left to its own devices the crown forms a broad dome. The branches grow at odd angles, rather like the antlers of a stag, which is one reason it’s called stag’s horn sumac (sometimes spelt "sumach"). The other reason is that the new shoots appear with a soft fur on them just like the velvet that covers the newly grown antlers of a stag.
This means that even when the last leaves have blown away the tree has an odd sculptural presence in the garden that I like. And most sumacs growing in Ireland are female and they tend to hold their fruits all through the winter. They are also rather furry, in large upright cones of a dark crimson colour that add to the trees ornamental value.
The tree seems to have some other uses, though I haven’t tried them. I’m told you can make a type of pink lemonade from the fruits or turn them into a jelly. And some Native American people apparently still mix the dried fruit and leaves with tobacco and smoke it.
Of course there have to be some down sides. They produce lots of root suckers so the friend who gave me my parent stock wasn’t really doing me a great favour: he was weeding out unwanted suckers from his lawn.
I’ve passed on some of my own to other people and planted some in field corners.
Some people also get an allergic reaction to sumac sap; the plant is a close relation of poison ivy.
Despite this, the tree has been a favourite in cottage gardens for a long time. The first specimens were imported into these islands from Virginia as early as 1610. It’s a pioneer species and will grow in the poorest of soils, provided they aren’t water-logged. The only thing it won’t tolerate is dense shade.
It has become a little unfashionable in recent decades and, given the present splendour of the ones on the other side of my yard, I think this is a bit of a shame.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Monday, October 20, 2008
