When my mother turned 93 she finally agreed to get a little help around the house. The first cleaning lady the agency sent her was a West Indian whose name was Virus Crook. Isn't that an incredible name? Crook is funny enough, but Virus? Of course if you didn't have a previous conception of the word Virus, it certainly would be as pretty a name as Violet, wouldn't it?
How about Vermin - a no less appealing name than Vernon, unless you automatically conjure up visions of rats or cockroaches. Words like syphilis or lunacy would make pretty names if one didn't already know their meanings. It all comes down to previous influences, doesn't it?
The names given to plants can cause similar problems. Take the name streptocarpus. You might think you were getting a disease instead of a plant unless you were familiar with the plant's common name, Cape-primrose. We have such pre-conceived ideas about some plants that their reputations are ruined in advance. Take the sumac pictured above, for instance. My mother disliked it intensely, calling it a weed tree, and I'm afraid I've followed in her footsteps.
To a forester sumacs are nurse trees, offering protection to young seedlings of more desirable trees. But to a farmer, sumacs are trash trees, interlopers who would take over his open fields the minute his back is turned. That's exactly what they do on Locust Hill, sneaking out from the edges of the woods into the meadows like maggots, ready to devour any stretch of open land. If they're not cut down in a few years their trunks are as big around as aerosol cans.
Looked at without prejudice, however, sumacs can be extremely handsome. Last week driving home from Cambridge, New York, the dense canopies of sumac leaves turned the roadsides into flashes of fiery orange, brilliant red or sometimes a rich angry purple. Their growth habit reminds me of the low flat crowns of Acacia trees that are so common on the savannas of East Africa. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, and today's picture isn't handsome at all.
The most common sumac is the staghorn
variety, Rhus typhina, so named because its
thick branching twigs are covered with velvety
hairs like the beginning antlers of a stag. In
spring its compound fronds, lined with pinnate
leaflets, are bright green above but silvery white
beneath, a fact which goes unnoticed until they
are lifted by the wind. Its blossoms are born in
very large, dense clusters. The Indians made a
pink lemonade from these blossoms.
Once pollinated, the flowers form hairy clusters of red fruits that sit up like candelabra above the leaves. Squirrels and birds like to dine on these fruits and later drop the undigested seeds, nicely fertilized, where they will germinate. Rabbits and deer find the twigs and bark a nourishing diet in winter when tastier items are no longer available.
Last time we cut down a mess of sumac on Locust Hill I was amazed by the brilliant color of the trunks in cross-section - a sulfurous yellow core, circled by such distinct growth rings in contrasting tan that it was easy to count how many years we'd let them survive. Sumac bark contains an excellent substance for tanning leather, and one variety, Rhus coriaria, is grown in Sicily as a field crop. Its shoots are cut down each year as they are about to flower and the tannic substance is harvested.
Pretty as it is in summer and fall, in winter the sumac looks dead. The ends of its twigs actually do die, and its branches exhibit prominent leaf scars. Its silhouette is ungainly, stiff and angular, without the softening grace of other trees which have many lacy twigs. I'm afraid I will always react with distaste to sumac, the tree as well as the name.
