Staghorn Sumac

Size, growth and what to expect

Staghorn sumac stems stand 15 to 25 feet tall in a yard, and the colony spreads as wide as its root sprouts are allowed to run. Wild plants reach 40 feet. It grows fast, nearly three feet a year in its youth on an average site by our growth estimator's model. Female plants bear their first fruit at 3 to 4 years. The oldest stem dated by its rings was 21 years old.

Panicles of tiny greenish-white flowers 4 to 8 inches long open from May to July on separate male and female plants, and a colony generally sets at least some seed every year. The fruit is a cone of tiny drupes covered in red hairs that ripens by September and hangs on through winter, when pheasant, quail and turkey eat it. The name refers to the reddish-brown hairs on the young branches, like the velvet on a stag's antlers, and velvet sumac is its other name.

It grows wild from Nova Scotia west to Minnesota, south to Iowa, Tennessee and northern Alabama, and east to Georgia, Maryland and New Jersey. In the wild it takes dry, rocky or gravelly ground in old fields, clearings and woodland edges.

How to grow Staghorn Sumac

Staghorn sumac wants full sun and poor, dry ground: a gravel bank or the slope that will not grow grass. Rich wet soil makes it floppy. One plant becomes a colony as wide as you let it, so keep it 15 feet from the house with a mowed strip where it must stop. Set plants 6 to 12 feet apart in a screen or windbreak row.

Plant dormant bare-root or potted plants between leaf fall and bud break. The roots run shallow and wide, so dig wide and shallow, keep the crown at grade, backfill with the same lean soil and mulch lightly, off the stem. Seed has a hard coat. Pour water just off the boil over it and let it stand a day as it cools. Then keep it damp in the refrigerator for at least a month and sow it half an inch deep in spring.

Water every couple of weeks the first summer and then not at all. Rabbits gnaw young stems and deer nip tips, so cage the first plant for a year or two; after that the colony outgrows any browsing. Remove suckers where you do not want them and cut old stems to the ground in late winter.

Sumac is male or female and only females carry the red fruit cones, so plant several seedlings if you want fruit. Stems are short-lived and brittle, but the roots replace them. Verticillium wilt can kill a colony, so keep it on the dry, lean ground it wants.