The mantle sumac: how a tree that escaped an early death finally came to rest in the most unexpected of places. (2024)

IN THE 1980S, TWO MIDWESTERN MEN

who were fishing buddies, neighbors and more than moderatelyskilled in the industrial arts came across a rare old sumac blown downon a fencerow. Unlike most sumac in rural Iowa, this one had escaped ayoung death, nestled as it was along the barbed wire, out of the way ofthe mower and the plow. Free from the shade of larger trees, it grew toan unusual height, showing at least 25 growth rings when a strong windfinally ended its life. What the two friends did with the tree wasnearly as unusual as its advanced age: Much of it ended up as a mantlein the local funeral chapel, where it sits over the fireplace with anatural olive-green-yellow glow, surprising mourners and giving themsomething to talk about at a time when conversation can be difficult.

The tree that Jack Neuzil, my father. and his buddy. Don Ochs. madeuse of was a staghorn sumac, the fruit--called drupes--of which were asource of a lemon-tasting drink for many Native Americans. Staghornsumac (sometimes called stag's horn, vinegar, Virginia or velvetsumac) is so named for MO reasons, both related to male deer. Thebranches and pinnate leaves of the staghorn grow in an upright,spreading manner. resembling the antlers of an adult deer: its shootsare covered with a fine, white hair that looks like the velvet skin on astage antlers.

But it was the 35-to 40-foot height of the tree, the relativelystraight trunk and the strange, fluorescent quality of its wood thatdrew my father and Don to it. Along their journey with what became knownas the mantle sumac came subtle lessons about the value of a tree oftenignored if not downright scorned as a trash species or. worse, a weed.

SUMAC THROUGH THE AGES

Sumac, with about 250 species across the world, has been usedthroughout history for everything from medicines to a dinner garnish, aningredient in wax, a tobacco additive and a dye. Various members of thesumac family (Anacardiaceae) can be found in North America, southernAfrica, eastern Asia and northeastern Australia in a variety of forms,including deciduous or evergreen, shrubs, trees or woody climbers, intemperate or subtropical climates. In North America, sumacs are commonin roadside ditches, known for their brilliant red or orange leaves inthe fall.

Sumacs in their ubiquity have been described, catalogued andcommented. on since olden times. Naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing inthe first century, noted the use of the juice of the fruit of the"sumach-tree of Syria" by curriers in the making of leather.Pliny compared the appearance of the seed to that of a lentil and wrotethat it "forms a necessary ingredient in various medicaments."The ancients mistakenly believed it to be a relief for fever. but theywere accurate about its ability to help preserve animal skins. TheJapanese, in their famous and oft-imitated black lacquers, were said touse its sap. In China, the Chinese characters for sumac literally mean"paint tree." An 11th-century shipwreck., discovered centurieslater off the coast of Rhodes, Greece, was filled with containers ofsumac drupes that were being shipped to market.

Native American use varied by tribe. The Abenaki mixed its leavesand berries with tobacco for smoking. The Menominee used its liquid atboth ends: as a gargle for-coughs and as a relief from hemorrhoids. Themilky white juice from a.cut twig served them as an astringent. TheCherokee and Delaware applied sumac for any number of problems thatrequired strong medicine, including gonorrhea.

In the 19th-century United States, the tanning industry combinedsumac with hemlock to treat leather, while weavers mixed it with gallnuts as a mordant to fix colors in aniline dyes. Writing in The AmericanBotanist in 1909, Frank Dobbin recalled, "Our grandmothers too hada use for the sumach. They gathered the fruit or 'bobs' asthey were called, and by boiling them made a dye that would produce afine shade of silver gray."

Its value in leather making and dyes led the citizens of ruralAppalachia to gather up its leaves in the fall, stuff them into balesand send them to city markets, a venture worth "tens of thousands ayear to the income of the State of Virginia," according to an 1881estimate in Scribner's Monthly.

None of these attributes, though, prevents the sumac from sometimesbeing scorned as a weed with an incorrigible personality. It can growfrom seed, of Course, but also from its aggressive underground stems,known as rhizomes, which can run far away from the trunk and sprout newshoots. And at least three species are highly toxic--poison oak, poisonsumac and poison ivy.

Rhus vernix, poison sumac, is handsome to look at, but hard tohandle. "Rhus rash" was an early epithet. A prevailing beliefbought into by no less an authority than Harvard professor Dr. Asa Gray,dean of 19th-century botanists, that smelling a sumac from as far as 20feet away spreads infection was in error, however. So was the use ofhorse urine as a cure. Alfred, Lord Tennyson noted that a sumac speciesprovided an ingredient for the "wourali poison made by the nativesof Guiana," a toxin that in modern times we know as curare. Andthen there is climbing poison ivy, perhaps the most feared and reviledplant in the New World, the creature that the understated Captain JohnSmith wrote "causeth redness, itchinge. and lastly blysters..."

While these poison sumac varieties are more easily identified bythe fruits, which droop from the branch and are white or gray, staghornsumacs and other non-poisonous varieties can be spotted by the deeplycrimson, round and somewhat-hairy drupes they sport on their uprightstalks. These stalks are about eight inches high on the female tree andare eaten by dozens of songbirds and game birds, as well as rodents,rabbits and squirrels. Nature writer John Burroughs, in Wake-Robin,described the flavor of the berry appearing in the honey of particularbees in his neighborhood, who mixed sumac nectar with clover, thyme andlinden.

TAKING A CHANCE ON SUMAC

In a small Iowa town in 2003, the local funeral home director,Terry Brosch, was building a new chapel a bit farther off the noisystate highway than his old digs. In the large common room. lie wanted ared, brick fireplace to stretch along one wall. Terry also wanted alocally sourced mantle over the hearth, so he went to local woodworkerJack Neuzil for ideas. The two spent part of an afternoon diggingthrough foot after foot of board lumber in Jack's shop before theycame to several quarter-sawn boards; about six feet long and 10 incheswide, of an unusual coloration: an almost glowing yellow-green, withbold flowing streaks of dark brown. In fact, under a black light, mediumto bright streaks of sumac green glow fluorescently. The boards had beenleaning in the stacks for perhaps two decades.

"That's sumac," jack said.

"That's what I want," Terry replied. "Will itwork?"

Jack showed him a child's stepstool with a dinosaur carved onits step made from the tree.

The sumac, lighter than oak, but heavier than cedar, was sawn,shaped and dropped into place as the mantle for the town's newfuneral chapel. It stretches five or more feet along the top of thefire-place, where mourners can lean on it and stare into the fire orturn away and face their companions. One board from the originalstaghorn sumac remained.

Seven years passed, until luck visited my house in the person ofone of the elite artists and wood-workers in the Midwest, ThomasSchrunk. Among his many accomplishments, Tom provides Steinway with theveneers for its pianos. He has redone a kitchen for the Royal CrescentHotel (dating from 1767) in Bath, England, and tabletops for the Princeand Princess of Jodhpur. He has counted Ronald Reagan and Sophia Lorenas clients.

Each year, Torn holds a fundraising drawing to benefit one of hiswife's projects, with the winner getting a Schrunk veneer table.This time, Tom drew 200 names from a hat, but "just for fun, Idecided to award the prize to the last name drawn, rather than thefirst," he said. My name was the very final one drawn. By beinglast, I won.

Rather than select one of his beautiful tables as my prize, I askedTom if he would be amenable to building a table a bit out of theordinary although from a common species. "Sure," he said."What kind of wood did you have in mind?"

"Sumac. There is one board left, from a prodigious tree."

Silence. Then, "Sounds like fun. Let's have a look atit."

Tom was not dubious when he saw the sumac, but he was realistic."There's a reason that there are only 20 main furniture-gradespecies in North America," he said. I was reminded ofThoreau's tale in Walden of a kitchen table made of "theapple-tree wood." If apple, why not sumac?

The reasons for "why not" are many. "There arespecies that grow straight and tall and drop their lower limbs and havevery little in terms of knots," Torn said. Sumac is not one ofthose species. But we forged ahead.

I found a pattern for a hexagon table from a 1917 Chicago PublicSchools industrial arts manual; it looked like it belonged in my early20th-century bungalow. Twelve small pieces were all we could manage fromour remaining board. which had about five inches of usable width. Tornused air-dried black walnut for the tablets pedestal, base and as aframe for the top--we didn't have enough sumac left for a completesurface. We carefully laid six five-sided pieces of sumac into the outerpart of the top; six more two-inch, equilateral-shaped pieces satinside.

After the table was complete, Tom and I carefully saved the fewsumac scraps of various sizes in a paper sack. None of the pieces wasmore than two or three inches long and an inch wide, but I had an idea.Jim Kuebelbeck, my father-in-law, was fond of turning multi-wood bowlson his old Sears Craftsman lathe. I dropped off the sack, and in a fewweeks, he combined them with black walnut to turn a seven-inch candydish. Now, about all that remained of our mantle tree was sawdust andshavings.

At the time, none of us thought of our work as being in sustainablewood, but that's what happened. Iowa, where our tree was round. isamong the farthest western homes for the staghorn sumac in the UnitedStates. After our exhaustion of the lumber from the mantle tree, myfather and I went on a search for one of similar size in late 2012. Somecan grow, as it did. up to 40 feet high and live decades, but we couldonly find younger trees, nothing more than 12-to 15-feet tall. Spraying.mowing and controlled burns (the thin bark is not fire tolerant) keptany from reaching older age. No longer collected by Virginians fortanning or dye or by Native Americans for a drinkable ade, the staghorn.sumac's only remaining economic importance, according to the U.S.Department of Agriculture, is erosion control.

As our experience showed, this focus on economics overlookscultural uses. In A Place of My Own., Michael Pollan tells of being"struck by the amount of cultural freight the various wood specieshad been made to carry. at least the ones we've seen fit to bringindoors." Pollan was thinking of Danish modern furniture usuallymade of clear maple or arts and crafts rendered in oak We were at theother end of this idea: a wood that signified nothing indoors to21st-century westerners because it almost always stayed outside, uncut.The more my father and I looked at the twisted and bent trunks ofsmaller trees, the more we appreciated the straight, wide section of ourmantle sumac, and its use in furniture, a fireplace and a bowl areextraordinary examples of an ordinary tree that lives on.

The mantle stretches five or more feet along the top of thefireplace, where mourners can lean on it and stare into the fire or turnaway and face their companions.

Dr. Mark Neuzil teaches environmental communication at theUniversity of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn.