Photo: Cody Hough, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Sassafras
Sassafras albidum
Also called white sassafras, ague tree, mitten tree, cinnamon wood.
Mitten leaves, orange fall color and fat-rich blue berries on red stalks that thrushes and flycatchers strip in late summer; host of the spicebush swallowtail.
Wildlife valueFall colorDrought tolerant
- Type
- Medium tree
- Mature height
- 30–60 ft
- USDA zones
- 4–9
- Growth rate
- Medium
- Sun
- Full · Part
- Soil moisture
- Average · Dry
210
Sassafras is a pioneer of old fields, fencerows, roadsides and dry wooded slopes from Maine to Michigan and south to Florida and Texas; it grows throughout Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Every part of it smells of root beer. Clusters of small yellow-green flowers open in April before the leaves, which come in three shapes, oval, mitten and three-lobed, and turn yellow, orange and scarlet in October. Female trees carry dark blue fruit on thick red stalks, ripe in August and September, high in fat and taken by kingbirds, great crested flycatchers, thrushes, vireos and catbirds, often before it can fall. The leaves feed the spicebush swallowtail, whose caterpillars eat little besides sassafras and spicebush, and the promethea and imperial moths. Ideal for an old field going back to woods, a sunny fencerow or a yard corner where a small grove can spread.
It is familiar and rarely sold, because a seedling drives down a taproot before it makes much top and resents moving after a year or two. It also runs: root suckers rise around a parent and in time make a colony, fine in a hedgerow, not on a lawn, where mowing keeps them down. Male and female flowers are on separate trees, and only females fruit. In the Southeast, laurel wilt, a fungus carried by an introduced ambrosia beetle, is killing sassafras as it killed redbay; it reached Kentucky in 2019 and there is no cure.
How to grow Sassafras
Sassafras wants full sun or light shade, zones 4 through 9, and well-drained soil on the acid side: dry sand and gravel suit it, moist sandy loam grows it fastest, wet clay rots its roots and limestone yellows it. In shade it thins and dies back. A tree grows 30 to 60 feet tall and 25 to 40 wide, so give it 20 feet from the house and a colony room to run.
Plant it small and dormant, from leaf fall to bud swell, and never move it again; the deep early root resents it. Dig a hole wider than the roots and deep enough for the taproot, flare at grade, native soil back in, mulch off the stem. Seed needs about 120 days of cold, damp stratification: clean off the pulp and sow it a quarter to half an inch deep in a screened, mulched bed late in fall, since early sowing sprouts before winter, or refrigerate it in damp sand four months and sow in spring. The oily seed keeps a year or two cold, not much longer.
Water weekly the first summer if rain is short; then it stands drought. Deer browse it in every season and rabbits strip the bark in winter, so cage it three or four years and keep mulch thin against voles. Prune only dead wood, in winter; to keep one trunk, mow or cut the suckers as they come.
Growth is medium to fast, quickest in sun. Only females fruit, and a seedling shows its sex only when it flowers, at four years in the open at the earliest and usually nearer ten, so plant three to five. Expect suckers. Where laurel wilt has arrived a tree can die in weeks and there is no treatment: cut and chip any tree that wilts suddenly in summer, and never move firewood.
Heights and zones are typical ranges for the species in cultivation; local conditions and seed source shift them.
- Multistem or single stem? Sometimes the trunk is hiding the answer
- Leaf litter, not wood chips, under the canopy
- Native trees and shrubs for butterflies and moths: host plants first, nectar second
- Native trees and shrubs for wildlife: what deer, squirrels, bears, bats, turtles and salamanders actually get from a planting
- Ten planting mistakes that quietly kill trees
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