A deciduous, small tree of gaunt, flat-topped habit, occasionally 25 or more feet high; branchlets thick, very pithy, yielding when cut a copious, yellowish-white, thick juice, soon turning black and hard on exposure; all the young bark is covered with short, dense, reddish hairs. Leaves pinnate, 1 to 2 ft long, consisting of from about thirteen to twice as many leaflets, which are oblong-lanceolate, 2 to 41⁄2 in. long, 1⁄2 to 1 in. wide, long-pointed, toothed, covered with brownish hairs when young, nearly or quite glabrous by autumn (the stalk remaining downy). Female flowers crowded in a dense, pyramidal, very hairy panicle 4 to 8 in. long; male flowers (which are borne on separate plants) greenish, and on a bigger, more open panicle. Fruits closely packed in dense panicles, and covered thickly with crimson hairs.
Native of eastern N. America, and cultivated in England since the reign of James I. The female plant is one of the handsomest of sumachs, for, added to its finely coloured fruit clusters, its leaves acquire in autumn rich shades of orange, red, and purple. The male plant, which colours its leaves too, is sometimes known as “R. viridiflora”. This tree succeeds remarkably well in some of the murkiest of London suburbs. It is sometimes used as a fine-foliaged summer shrub, grown in a group, and cut back every spring almost to the ground, the young shoots being afterwards reduced to one or two. Given liberal treatment at the root, erect stems 5 or 6 ft high with leaves up to 3 ft long will be produced, the leaflets correspondingly large.
cv. ‘Dissecta’ (‘Laciniata’). – Leaflets very handsomely cut (R. typhina var. laciniata Manning ex Rehd., not Wood; R. typhina f. dissecta Rehd., R. typhina var. filicina Sprenger).
‘Dissecta’ was found at the end of the last century by J. W. Manning, a nurseryman of Reading, Massachusetts, who propagated and distributed it as R. typhina laciniata, but this name had been used earlier for another variant (see below). Besides being a beautiful foliage plant, it colours brilliantly in the autumn. A.M. 1910.
f. laciniata (Wood) Rehd. – Leaves and bracts more or less laciniate; inflorescence often partly transformed into contorted bracts. A monstrous form said to be fairly common in the wild. Not to be confused with ‘Dissecta’, often known as ‘Laciniata’.