TheMondayGarden.com

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
November 12, 2005, Issue 186

Staghorn sumac and smooth sumac (not close kin of the poison kin) are truly part of our great American heritage. The Monday Garden Issue 148 entitled “Ailanthus and Sumac”, January 23, 2005, covers sumac’s biological and cultural information. Issue 180, October 2, 2005, was dedicated to the plants’ year-round drop-dead gorgeous beauty. When Issue 180 was posted, the smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) was just beginning to turn so this issue is devoted to the amazing, breathing-taking autumn color of this “friend of the birds”.

Picture: smooth sumac, near the Mill River, Stamford, CT, November 2005

These pictures were taken in four Stamford CT locations where the birds have planted this friend of theirs:

• along a busy multi-lane urban highway, (Bedford Street at the First Presbyterian Church);
• in Scalzi Park, famous for Little League games;
• downtown, near the Mill River, behind another major highway, Washington Boulevard, in a section that’s been purchased by the town and is now fenced off, waiting to be part of the Mill River walk-park some day, and
• downtown behind the town mall, at the edge of a block-size excavation made, I think in the 1980’s for a building that never got built due to an economic recession, and which has not since found the right occupant and which is fondly (?) known locally as “The Hole In The Ground”.

If smooth sumac can do this well in a bad drought year with no help from humans, think how wonderful it would look in your garden, particularly if accompanied by adoring song birds.