Smooth Sumac
Rhus glabra
Thomas Jefferson listed Smooth Sumac as native North American species and tried to obtain seeds of it for one of his friends in France
Thomas Jefferson listed "sumach" as an ornamental native species in his Notes on the State of Virginia.1
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 1726.2
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.
- Peggy Cornett, n.d.
Primary Source References
1786 January 27. (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 ...."3
Further Sources
- Dutton, Joan Parry. Plants of Colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 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: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
- Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.
Footnotes
- Notes, ed. Peden, 41.
- Alice M. Coats, Garden Shrubs and Their Histories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 167.
- PTJ, 9:228-30. Transcription available at Founders Online.