Smooth Sumac

Few shrubs match smooth sumac for fall color, and almost none are as easy to place. Rhus glabra is native to all 48 contiguous states, which is a range no other woody plant in the catalog can claim. It grows 9 to 15 feet tall and wide in full sun to part sun, hardy from Zone 3 through Zone 8, and establishes fast.

The compound leaves are long and fern-like, blue-green through summer, turning scarlet and orange in fall in a display that runs as bright as anything you can plant. Upright clusters of greenish flowers open in early summer, followed on female plants by dense cones of fuzzy crimson fruit that hold on the bare branches all winter.

Bees come to the flowers, many bird species take the fruit through winter when other food runs out, and the foliage feeds red-banded hairstreak caterpillars.

Smooth sumac spreads to form a colony, which is what makes it valuable for holding a bank, filling a rough edge, or covering ground where nothing else will grow. That same habit makes it wrong for a small formal bed, so give it a site where spreading is welcome. It handles drought, salt, poor dry soil, and rocky ground, and deer leave it alone.