Sumac lemonade

Along the edge of every meadow stands an army of staghorn sumac. Like the ghosts of mythical warriors appearing through mist on a battlefield, in September they suddenly come alive, brandishing their crimson fruits in uplifted clusters. Demanding attention, they greet the wanderer and crisp autumn air with compound leaves of orange and scarlet. Against such gallant finery, the clumps of white and purple asters and goldenrod dance dazzlingly.

Since my childhood, Rhus typhina has arched over my secret pathways looking vaguely exotic and tropical (though there is nothing so quintessentially Ontarion as a clump of these small trees emblazoning the edge of an abandoned field, screaming Red! like a war cry).

"You can make a drink that tastes like lemonade from their berries," I told my friends in the Poplar Bluff Nature Club. But I never made it, never tasted it. Like so many things put off until tomorrow, it never happened.

Identifying the edible sumac

Staghorn sumac is unmistakable. It is closely related to smooth sumac, R. glabra, which has smooth, rather than fuzzy berries and is also edible. The genus also has three poisonous species in Ontario, but poison ivy (R. radicans) and poison oak (R. siloba) are both low shrubs or ground-hugging vines with three-part leaves, and poison sumac (R. vernix) has white fruit. R. typhina by contrast grows as high as 10 m (33 ft). The large leaves are pinnately compound with 11 to 29 finely-toothed, pointed leaflets. (This information is from Edible Wild Fruits and Nuts of Canada, by Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski, National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa, 1979, which unfortunately is out of print.) An identification fact sheet is available at Trees and Shrubs of Northern Ontario from Sault College Natural Resources.

This morning, with the first hint of frost on the air, the crowd of sumacs in the phoebe's meadow looked especially dashing. So I walked over and snapped off 8 or 10 clusters of the bright berries.

Technically speaking, they are drupes. R. typhina is a member of Anacardiaceae, the same illustrious family that brings us cashews and mangoes.

Fuzzy, sticky and sour

The furry fruits felt sticky when I rubbed them. The fine carmine hairs got into the lines of my fingerprint. My finger tasted lemony. The hairs contain malic acid, which contributes to the flavour. It washes off as fall and winter progress so the fruits eventually dry and lose their quality.

But beetle larvae still find them palatable. Raid a sumac cluster in

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