Smooth Sumac
Common Name: Smooth Sumac[1]
Scientific Name: Rhus glabra
Thomas Jefferson lists it as an ornamental native species in his Notes on the State of Virginia.[2]
Smooth Sumac, a native of Eastern North America from Quebec to Georgia, has been in cultivation since the early 17th century. It arrived in Britain around 1726.[3]
Smooth Sumac is a deciduous, North American shrub that forms brilliant scarlet, plume-like fruit clusters on the female plants. The glabrous leaves turn an intense red or orange-red in autumn.
Primary Source References[4]
1786 January 17. (Jefferson to John Bartram Jr.). "Inclosed is a list of plants and seeds which I should be very glad to obtain from America for a friend here whom I wish much to oblige...Rhus glabrum..."[5]
Footnotes
- ↑ This section is based on a Center for Historic Plants Information Sheet.
- ↑ Notes ed. Peden, 41.
- ↑ Alice M. Coats, Garden Shrubs and their Histories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 167.
- ↑ Please note that this list should not be considered comprehensive.
- ↑ Betts, Garden Book, 109-110.
Further Sources
- Dutton, Joan Parry. Plants of Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg, 1979
- Horsfield, Thomas. An Experimental Dissertation on the rhus vernix, rhus radicans and rhus glabrum: commonly known in Pennsylvania by the names of poison-ash, poison-vine and common sumach. Philadelphia: Printed by Charles Cist, 1798
- Leighton, Ann. American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986
- Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants
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