Preferred Habitat - Dry, rough or rocky places, banks, roadsides.
Flowering Season - June.
Distribution - Nova Scotia to Georgia, and westward 1500 miles.
Painted with glorious scarlet, crimson, and gold, the autumnal
foliage of the sumacs, and even the fruit, so far eclipse their
inconspicuous flowers in attractiveness that one quite ignores
them. Not so the small, short-tongued bees (chiefly Andrenidae)
and flies (Dipteria) seeking the freely exposed nectar secreted
in five orange-colored glands in the shallow little cups. As some
of the flowers are staminate and some pistillate, although others
show a tendency to revert to the perfect condition of their
ancestors, it behooves them to entertain their little
pollen-carrying visitors generously, otherwise no seed can
possibly be set. And how the autumnal landscape would suffer from
the loss of the decorative, dark-red, velvety panicles! Beware
only of the poison sumac's deadly, round grayish-white berries.
Most sumacs contain more or less tannin in their bark and leaves,
that are therefore eagerly sought by agents for the leather
merchants.
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