A very commonplace and uninteresting looking weed is this spurge, which no one but a botanist would suspect of kinship with the brilliant vermilion poinsettia, so commonly grown in American greenhouses.Examination shows that these little bright white cups of the flowering spurge, simulating a five-cleft corolla, are no more the true flowers in the one case than the large red bracts around the poinsettia's globular greenish blossom involucres are in the other.From the milky juice alone one might guess the spurge to be related to the rubber plant.Still another familiar cousin is the stately castor-oil plant; and while the common dull purplish IPECAC SPURGE (E.Ipecacuanhae) also suggests unpleasant doses, it is really a member of quite another family that furnishes the old-fashioned emetic.The flowering spurge, having its staminate and pistillate flowers distinct, depends upon flies, its truest benefactors, to transfer pollen from the former to the latter.
STAGHORN SUMAC; VINEGAR TREE
(Rhus hirta; R.typhina of Gray) Sumac family Flowers - Greenish or yellowish white, very small, usually 5-parted, and borne in dense upright, terminal, pyramidal clusters.Stem: A shrub or small tree, 6 to 40 ft.high, the ends of branches forked somewhat like a stag's horns.Leaves.
Compounded of 11 to 31 lance-shaped, saw-edged leaflets, dark green above, pale below; the petioles and twigs often velvety-hairy.Fruit: Small globules, very thickly covered with crimson hairs.
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.The beautiful SMOKE or MIST TREE (R.cotinus), commonly imported from southern Europe to adorn our lawns (although a similar species grows wild in the Southwest), serves a more utilitarian purpose in supplying commerce with a rich orange-yellow dye-wood known as young fustic.All this tribe of shrubs and trees contain resinous, milky juice, drying dark like varnish, which in a Japanese species is transformed by the clever native artisans into their famous lacquer.With a commercial instinct worthy of the Hebrew, they guard this process as a national secret.
The SMOOTH, UPLAND, or SCARLET SUMAC (R.glabra), similar to the staghorn, but lacking its velvety down, and usually of much lower growth, is the very common and widely distributed shrub of dry roadsides, railroad banks, and barren fields.Another low-growing, but more or less downy upland sumac, the DWARF, BLACK, or MOUNTAIN SUMAC (R.copallina), may be known by its dark, glossy green foliage, pale on the underside, and by the broadening of the stem into wings between the leaflets.Hungry migrating birds alight to feast on the harmless acid red fruit when the gorgeous autumnal foliage illuminates their route southward.But while they are, of course, the natural agents for distributing the plants over the country, men find that by cutting bits of any sumac root and planting them in good garden soil, strong specimens are secured within a year.An exquisite cut-leaved variety of the smooth sumac adorns many fine lawns.
Everyone should know the POISON SUMAC (R.Vernix - R.venenata of Gray) as the shrub above all others to avoid.Like its cousin, the POISON or THREE-LEAVED IVY (R.radicans), which once had the specific name Toxicodendron, although Linnaeus applied that title to a hairy shrub of the Southern States, the poison sumac causes most painful swelling and irritation to the skin of some people, though they do nothing more than pass it by when the wind is blowing over it.Others may handle both these plants with impunity.In spring they are especially noisome; but when the pores of the skin are opened by perspiration, people who are at all sensitive should give them a wide berth at any season.
Usually the poison sumac grows in wet or swampy ground; its bark is gray, its leaf-stalks are red; the leaves are compounded, of fewer leaflets than those of the innocent sumacs - that is, of from seven to thirteen - which are green on both sides; the flowers, which are dull whitish-green, grow in loose panicles from the axils of the leaves, and naturally the berries follow them in the same unusual situation."By their fruits ye shall know them:" all the harmless sumacs have red fruit clusters at the ends of the branches, whereas both the poison sumac's and the poison ivy's axillary clusters are dull grayish-white.
AMERICAN HOLLY
(Ilex opaca) Holly family Flowers - Very small, greenish or yellowish white, from 3 to 10staminate ones in a short cyme; fertile flowers usually solitary, scattered.Stem: A small tree of very slow growth, rarely attaining any great height.Leaves: Evergreen, thick, rigid, glossy, elliptical, scalloped edged, spiny-tipped.Fruit: Round, red berries.
Preferred Habitat - Moist woods and thickets.
Flowering Season - April-June.
Distribution - Maine to the Gulf of Mexico, west to Texas, chiefly near the coast and south of New York.