Autumn glory of a true American beauty

A BREEZY DAY with showers of rain is bringing clouds of leaves down off the trees. It’s the essence of autumn, my favourite season.

At the far side of the yard the dark grey tarmac now has a carpet of red and gold. It’s made up of the leaves from the stag’s horn sumacs (rhus typhina) that grow beside it. Originally it was just one tree, a sapling that was a gift from a friend. But these small trees are very industrious when it comes to producing root suckers and one sumac, left to its own devices, rapidly becomes a grove of clones.

I think the word “sumac“ (which is sometimes spelt “sumach”) is from a native American language. The sumac family is quite large and different species grow all over the globe. But the stag’s horn sumac is a native of eastern North America, where it grows in the shade of the taller trees in those forests that are so famous for their colours in the fall.

It gets its name from the fact that its branches fork at angles like a deer’s antlers. This, combined with its glorious autumn leaf colour, make it a good ornamental tree.

When the leaves finally fall they are survived by the fruits, odd spires, dark red and furry, sitting upright on the ends of the branches, which are also furry and pale brown, contrasting with the scaly grey bark.

Sumac leaves are pinnate. This is the botanical name for a leaf that has a central stalk with a number of leaflets on each side of it.

My old edition of the Collins Tree Guide, by the late Alan Mitchell, has two pages devoted to drawings of leaves with the proper botanical name for the leaf shape.

There are thirty-seven names in all, from “acicular” to “truncate”.

It’s a pity that in the new edition by Owen Johnson they have dropped this feature in favour of a less academic way of describing leaf shape. This deprives us of words like “auricle” (an oak leaf).

Anyway, sumac is quite common in cottage gardens and in older housing estates in this country but it’s not planted as much as it used to be. This is probably because gardeners have become fed up with its habit of producing root suckers in unwelcome places.

It may also be because some people have an allergy to its sap. In fact, relations of the stag’s horn sumac include poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac.

There is another member of the sumac family that is a native of southern Europe and the Middle East. It’s more a shrub than a tree and grows wild in the mountains of Sicily. But it’s also cultivated because it’s a much more benign and useful plant.

The berries are dried and crushed into a coarse, purple-red powder which is a key flavouring in the cuisine of Turkey, Lebanon and many Arab countries. The taste is aromatic and fruity but predominantly sour. It’s preferred to lemon juice or vinegar for providing sour tastes in salad dressings and some drinks but, above all, it’s used in marinades for grilled meat and fish.

A real Turkish doner kebab, eaten in Turkey rather than your local fast food joint, will have sumac in it. But don’t try it with the fruit from the sumac tree in your garden. The North American variety is not the same.

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