Staghorn sumac is one of those plants that can become difficult to take seriously. It grows along roadsides and ditches, prefers open ground, spreads quickly and will happily colonize a yard if given the opportunity. The young branches are covered in short hairs that feel like velvet, which explains the name. Later come the red berry clusters, standing upright above the leaves.
It is also remarkably useful.
The berries can be made into a drink. I take two or three clusters, put them in about two litres of water, swirl them around and leave them for a few hours. The little hairs on the berries carry acidic juices, which wash into the water. The result has a pleasant citrusy bite. A little sugar or mint improves it, and it is particularly good chilled.
There is one small complication. Rain washes the acidic material off the berries. So a beautifully red cluster collected immediately after a storm may be less useful than it looks. The berries need a few dry days to recharge, so to speak. Sumac has apparently developed a beverage department with weather-dependent hours.
The friction-fire use is less obvious. What first attracted me was not the wood itself but the amount of dead, dry wood that remains on a living plant. Sumac grows in open areas where sunlight and air can dry those dead branches while they are still above the ground. That makes them unusually accessible when you are looking for material that is already cured.
Finding a straight eight-inch spindle is another matter. Sumac will send young shoots straight upward for several feet, but those are not the dead pieces you need. The useful dead wood tends to come in shorter sections, which means you have to work with what the plant has actually provided rather than what you might have ordered.
Then there is the centre of the wood. Young sumac branches have a soft, foamy core. As the branch gets older, that core sometimes remains while the outside becomes harder. For a bow-and-drill fire, that turns out to be an excellent combination. The harder outer wood creates the heat. The soft centre breaks down into the fine material that becomes the coal. The spindle, baseboard and handhold can all be made from the plant.
That was something I had not found described elsewhere. I had experimented with a lot of woods for friction fire, and sumac turned out to have an arrangement that was particularly well suited to it. The plant had, quite accidentally, put two different materials in the same piece of wood.
The same soft centre makes sumac useful for something considerably less smoky. Young shoots can be hollowed out easily, which makes them suitable for pipe stems and potentially traditional flutes. I have made traditional wooden flutes, but not from sumac. The possibility is there because the plant has already done the boring part of making the hole.
Where sumac really earns its keep for me is maple tapping. I have made thousands of wooden spiles from it for heritage demonstrations. A four- or five-inch piece of young sumac can be cut, half-piped, have the soft centre removed and be tapered at one end to fit into a maple tree. With a little practice, the whole thing takes less than a minute.
The diameter is convenient too. Those young shoots happen to grow to about the right size for a maple tap. You can make a short spile with a place to hang the bucket, or a much longer one that reaches beyond the widened base of the tree and lets the sap drip into a container on the ground. Older wooden spiles in sugarbush camps were often half-piped as well. Exactly why is uncertain, although making the hollow easier to clean and reducing the possibility of a frozen tube splitting are both plausible explanations. I would leave them as explanations rather than turn them into facts.
And that is probably the part of bushcraft worth paying attention to. Not every useful thing in the woods arrives with a known purpose. Sometimes you notice what a plant is already doing and work from there. Sumac has a foamy centre, dead branches that dry in the sun, young shoots that grow to a useful diameter and berries that can make a drink.
It also grows back. Cut some of the young shoots and the root system sends up more. Leave it alone for a year and a half and there can be eight-foot stalks everywhere. You can overharvest it, of course, but you have to work fairly hard at it.
So staghorn sumac may be a weed, depending on your relationship with your yard.
In the woods, it has rather better credentials.
adaptation from A Bushcrafter’s Guide to Staghorn Sumac is Episode 11 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, released June 1, 2024.