Prairie Sumac

Description:

AKA: Flameleaf Sumac, Prairie Flameleaf Sumac A deciduous shrub or small tree to 20 feet tall and one or more trunks to 8" in diameter, with irregular branching that forms a loose, rounded crown of shiny green foliage. Leaf: Branches, twigs, and leaves without prickles or thorns; leaves are alternate, once-compound, 5" to 9" long, with 11 to 21 leaflets and a weakly-winged rachis ; leaflets 1" to 3" long and up to 0.5" wide, lanceolate, the margins mostly without teeth. Leaves turn bright shades of yellow, orange, and red in the fall. Flowers: A tight spike of white flowers, 4" to 6" long, appears in spring at the ends of the branches. Fruit: A conical cluster of small, dark red, berry-like drupes, each about 0.2" in diameter with minute hairs. Bark: Smooth, gray-brown, developing horizontal lenticels that break up on larger trunks into scaly plates and rough fissures. Wood: Sold in nurseries as a native landscape specimen for its fall color. It grows as a single-trunked tree or when the ground is disterbed, suckering to form colonies.

Habitat:

Range: Disturbed sites, fencerows, and rocky limestone slopes in Central Texas, from the Balcones Escarpment north and west to the mountains of the Trans-Pecos. Native from southern Oklahoma through north, central, and west Texas to New Mexico and south to Puebla in Mexico, the limestone-loving Prairie Flameleaf Sumac is relatively fast growing, generally pest, disease-free and heat, cold, and drought tolerant.

Notes:

The leaves were used as a replacement for oak bark in tanning, and the fruit can be used to make a tart, tasty, high-Vitamin C beverage called, "sumac-ade", "rhus-ade" or "tea", when soaked in water. http://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.... (Found on everywhere on my nature walk and all over Texas. I did snag some berries to plant in my native yard. *** Last two pics added on 11/17/12 taken from the same location as the first.)