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Sumach   Listen
noun
Sumach, Sumac  n.  (Written also shumac)  
1.
(Bot.) Any plant of the genus Rhus, shrubs or small trees with usually compound leaves and clusters of small flowers. Some of the species are used in tanning, some in dyeing, and some in medicine. One, the Japanese Rhus vernicifera, yields the celebrated Japan varnish, or lacquer.
2.
The powdered leaves, peduncles, and young branches of certain species of the sumac plant, used in tanning and dyeing.
Poison sumac. (Bot.) See under Poison.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sumach" Quotes from Famous Books



... spots which they once favored. There used to be meadows full of rocks, in each crevice of which nodded a scarlet columbine, surrounded by grassy borders where wild strawberries grew thickly, with hedge-rows running riot with blackberry, sumach, and alder,—all reckless of utility and given over to lovely waste,—that were vocal on June mornings with bobolinks, but where in these times one might wait the whole day through and not hear a single note of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... box walk, the money jingling in his pocket. At the end of the long avenue of cedars there was a wide, unploughed common which extended for a quarter of a mile along the roadside. In spring and summer the ground was white with daisies and in the autumn it donned gorgeous vestments of golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow

... with berries; there are deserted pastures, bright with golden-rod and asters. And everywhere along the shores, against the dark pine woods, are the varied reds of oaks, of blackberry vines, of woodbine, and of sumach. ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin

... large orange-like pericarps, reminding one of the flora of the tropics. The Autumn was just beginning to paint the forest, and already some touches from his glowing palette appeared among the leaves of the sassafras laurel, the sumach (rhus), the persimmon (diospyros), the nymph-named tupelo, and those other species of the American sylva that love to array themselves so gorgeously before parting with their deciduous foliage. Yellow, orange, scarlet, crimson, with many an intermediate ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... shrubs. Among the timber trees, the oak, pine, fir, elm, ash, birch, walnut, beech, maple, chestnut, cedar, and aspen, are the principal. Of fruit-trees and shrubs there are walnut, chestnut, apple, pear, cherry, plum, elder, vines,[166] hazel, hickory, sumach, juniper, hornbeam, thorn, laurel, whortleberry, cranberry, gooseberry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, sloe, and others; strawberries of an excellent flavor are luxuriantly scattered over every part of the country. Innumerable varieties of useful and beautiful herbs and grasses enrich the forests, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... valley, in which its traditional peace seemed but the more profound. The skies darkened to an ineffable intensity of blue; the livery of the fields was changed, green giving place to gold; the woodlands and lower slopes of our hills flamed with the scarlet of dying sumach, with the russet and orange and crimson of a foliage making merry against its moribund to-morrows; a drought parched the land, and our little river lessened to a mere trickle of water. The daylight hours became sensibly abbreviated; while they endured they were golden and warm ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... spared for future butcheries. On we go across the austere plain, between fields of madder, the red roots of the 'garance' lying in swathes along the furrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren rock, here and there crimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands up and seems to bar all passage. Yet the river foams in torrents at our side. Whence can it issue? What pass or cranny in that precipice is cloven for its escape? These questions grow in interest as we enter the narrow defile of limestone rocks which leads to the cliff-barrier, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... marquetry—Braziletto, cam wood, logwood, Nicaragua, red sanders, sapan, ebony, fustic (a species of mulberry), Zante (a species of sumach). "Ebony is the black pear tree of Madagascar, at least they make cider of its fruit." So says M. Luchet in an interesting excursus on furniture manufacture in his book on the Paris Exhibition of 1867, in which he gives further ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson

... morning. Honeyman had stood my guard the night before, and in return, I had got up when he was called to help rustle the horses. We had every horse under hand before the sun peeped over the eastern horizon, and when returning to camp with the remuda, as I rode through a bunch of sumach bush, I found a wild turkey's nest with sixteen fresh eggs in it. Honeyman rode up, when I dismounted, and putting them in my hat, handed them up to Billy until I could mount, for they were beauties and as precious to us as gold. ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams

... parts of the State are yellow poplar, and beech; near the Ohio are cypress, and in several counties are clumps of yellow pine and cedar. On the Calamick, near the south end of lake Michigan, is a small forest of white pine. The undergrowth are redbud, pawpaw, sumach, plum, crab apple, grape vines, dogwood, spice ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck

... goldenglow, Purple asters And ruddy oaks, Sumach spreading Crimson cloaks, Apples red And ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert

... earth beneath his knees, nor the whip of the sumach across his face; he did not see the moon shadows creep slowly along the fallen birch; nor did he notice that the white-throat had hushed its song. His inmost spirit was shaken. Something had entered his soul and filled it to the brim, so that he ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... through the tangle of alder and sumach that bordered the lane and saw her suspicions confirmed. Annie was at the gate, her blue dress set against the white background of some blossom-laden cherry-boughs, while down the road, the long limbs of this probable descendant ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... proprieties? Probably not. I felt sure, by what I now experienced in myself, that, were I to live in that family one week, all such little deviations from the one accepted pattern of propriety would fall off, like many-colored sumach-leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting gently chilly. I tried to tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I felt in the air around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... crimson maple leaf had faded on the trees into more sombre colors, or, falling to the ground, been whirled by the wind among heaps of other leaves, where its splendor no more attracted attention. Of the gaiety of autumn, only the red bunches of the sumach were left as a parting present to welcome winter in. The querulous note of the quail had long been heard calling to his truant mate, and reproaching her for wandering from his jealous side; the robins had either sought a milder climate or were collected in the savin-bushes, in whose evergreen ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... is lovely. " Leaf I never trouble. " Monthly Beauty ever new. " Moss Superior merit. " Red I love you. " Yellow Infidelity. Rosemary Remembrance. Sensitive Plant Modesty. Snow-Ball Thoughts in heaven. Snow-Drop Consolation. Sumach Pride and poverty. Sweet William Gallantry. Syringa Memory. Sunflower Lofty thought. Tuberose Purity of mind. Thyme Activity. Tulip, var Beautiful eyes. Tulip, Red Declaration of love. Tritoma Fiery temper. Verbena Sensibility. " Purple I weep for you. " White Pray for me. Violet, ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan

... the verge of the great cliff and cast a sidelong glance at Barney Pratt, who was beating about among the red sumach bushes in the woods close at hand, and now and then stooping to search the heaps of pine needles and dead leaves where they had been blown together on ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... maple, the American elm, and the purple-blossomed sumach, the huge scorched and leafless stems of pines would throw up their giant arms as if to tell of some former conflagration. In clearings among these woods, slopes of ground are to be seen covered with ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... IVY—POISON SUMACH.—Mr. Charles Morris, of Philadelphia, who has studied the subject closely, uses, as a sovereign remedy, frequent bathing of the affected parts in water as hot as can be borne. If used immediately after exposure, it may prevent the eruption ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... like a weak-eyed Bacchus. Once he sat doting beside her at twilight on a bench of the wide gallery while his sister, near by, kept guard over their talk. I passed them, coming back from my tramp, with a glowing branch in my hand. For having set my teeth in the scarlet tart udder of a sumach, all frosted with delicate fretwork, I could not resist bringing away ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror their tracery in its steely surface. But ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... the embarrassed or bashful visitor: he passed at once from the security of the public road into shameful privacy. And here, in the mellow autumnal sunlight, that, streaming through the maples and sumach on the opposite bank, flickered and danced upon the floor, she sat and discoursed of George Washington, and thought of Perkins. She was quite in keeping with the house and the season, albeit a little in advance of both; ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... I climb'd to Heaven upon the shining stairs Of love and hope, and here am quite cast down. My little flower amidst a weedy world, Where art thou now? In deepest forest shade? Or onward, where the sumach stands array'd In autumn splendor, its alluring form Fruited, yet odious with the hidden worm? Or, farther, by some still sequester'd lake, Loon-haunted, where the sinewy panthers slake Their noon-day thirst, and never voice is heard ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... them," said his companion slowly, "for—" he stopped abruptly, broke off a bough from a sumach bush beside him, and falling on his knees, leaned far out over the stream. There were many tiny cascades in the brook with little eddies below them where sticks and leaves circled gaily around before they were drawn on to the next miniature fall, and into one of these ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... pound of camwood (in a bag) in two gallons of water, for fifteen minutes. Wet the articles, and boil them for a few minutes in the dye. White-walnut bark, the bark of sour sumach, or of white maple, set with alum, make ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... rapidly after logwood was added to them. Sugar was shown to have an especially hurtful action on the durability of inks containing logwood—indeed, on all inks. Many other plain inks were exhibited, and their properties described —as gallo-sumach ink, myrabolams ink, Runge's ink, —inks in which the tanno-gallate of iron was kept in solution by nitric, muriatic, sulphuric, and other acids, or by oxalate of potash, chloride of lime, etc. The myrabolams was recommended as an ink of some promise for durability, and as the ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... when the children were happily sailing boats, tearing to and fro like wild colts, or discovering the rustic treasures Nurse Nature lays ready to gladden little hearts and hands, Christie sat idly making a garland of green brakes, and ruddy sumach leaves ripened before the early ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott

... whose besides. This is really a pleasant method of enriching one's grounds with memorials of friends, nor is there any harm in making a shrubbery of celebrities. Three holes were already dug, and three new trees lay ready to be planted, and for me there was a sumach to plant,—a tree I never liked; but Mr. Hall said that they had tried to dig up a hawthorn, but found it clung too fast to the soil. So, since better might not be, and telling Mr. Hall that I supposed I should have a right to hang myself on this tree whenever ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the inner bark is scraped up into ridges around the sticks, and held in the fire until it is thoroughly roasted, when it is taken off the stick, pulverized in the hand, and is ready for smoking. It has the narcotic properties of the tobacco, and is quite agreeable to the taste and smell. The sumach leaf is also used by the Indians in the same way, and has a similar taste to the willow bark. A decoction of the dried wild or horse mint, which we found abundant under the snow, was quite palatable, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... associated with the recollection of its exhilarating effects, and thus bring along with them the resistless desire for its repetition." More than fifty per cent. of common spirits are alcohol, this deadly substance, holding rank with henbane, hemlock, prussic acid, foxglove, poison sumach. Nausea, vertigo, vomiting, exhilaration of spirits for a time, and subsequent stupor, and even total insensibility and death, are their accompaniments. Broussais remarks, "A single portion of ardent spirit taken into the stomach produces a temporary ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... and overhead the rafters were concealed by heavy garlands of white pine, golden maple leaves, and red oak branches, that swept from the roof downwards like a tent. Butternut leaves wreathed their clustering gold among the dark green hemlock, while, sumach cones, with flame-colored leaves, shot through the gorgeous forest branches. The rustic chandelier was in full blaze, while now and then a candle gleamed out through the garlands, starring them to the roof. Still, the illumination was neither broad nor ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens

... swinging trot, El Mahdi leading, the Cardinal next, and behind him the Bay Eagle. The road trailed along the high ridge beside the tall shell-bark hickories, now the granary of the grey squirrel, and the sumach bushes where the catbirds quarrelled, and the dry old poplars away in the blue sky, where the woodpecker and the great Indian ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... out his hands as if to clasp hers between them in the rapture of his devotion. Was it the light reflected from the glossy leaves of the poison sumach which overhung the path that made his cheek look so pale? Was he going to ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... stands on a little knoll, about a hundred yards from the open ocean. Behind it rises a ledge of rocks, where cedars and hemlocks make deep shadows into which the sun shoots golden shafts of light, illuminating the scarlet feathers of the sumach, which throw themselves jauntily forth from the crevices; while down below, in deep, damp, mossy recesses, rise ferns which autumn has just begun to tinge with yellow and brown. The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its right hand ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... or wool, have half a bushel of maple bark, the same of sumach berries, and a peck of walnut hulls or bark; put a layer of this in an iron pot, and a layer of the wool, till all is in; cover it with water, and boil it slowly for three hours, keeping the pot filled with water; then hang it out, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea

... off at a brisk rate on the road to the inn. He soon came to the lake. It lay to the right of the road. The many-coloured hills rose protectingly on the left. All along the edge of the water a flaming trail of sumach marked the curves where the obliging land withdrew as the ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... early start. We rode for hours through a beautiful shady forest, where a fragrant breeze in our faces made riding pleasant. Large oaks and patches of sumach appeared on the rocky slopes. We descended a good deal in this morning's travel, and the air grew appreciably warmer. The smell of pine was thick and fragrant; the sound of wind was sweet and soughing. Everywhere pine needles dropped, shining in the ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... all the signs of a settlement in a state of rapid and prosperous improvement were visible. The devious course of a deep and swift brook, that in the other hemisphere would have been termed a river, was to be traced through the meadows by its borders of willow and sumach. At a point near the centre of the valley, the waters had been arrested by a small dam; and a mill, whose wheel at that early hour was without motion, stood on the artificial mound. Near it was the ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... a summer morn, When all the glistening field was softly stirred And like a child's in happy sleep I heard The low and healthful breathing of the corn. Late when the sumach's red was dulled and worn, And fainter grew the trite and troublous word Of tristful cricket, that replaced the bird, I sought the slope, and found a ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone

... which multitudinous armies of fowls came at unseasonable hours and against which all Bill's ladylike indignation was vented in vain. As we watched behind the curtains a Dorking stepped through and began to prospect among the sumach and stramonium that Bill had encouraged along our frontiers, under an illusion that plants labelled "poisonous" in her American gardening book would decimate ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... women at this address, and, for an instant there was a strong and pretty general desire to adopt into the tribe one who owned so brave a spirit. Still there were dissenters from this wish, among the principal of whom might be classed the Panther, and his sister, Ie Sumach, so called from the number of her children, who was the widow of le Loup Cervier, now known to have fallen by the hand of the captive. Native ferocity held one in subjection, while the corroding passion of revenge prevented the other from admitting ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... the Mary Sparke of Plymouth of 50 tons, both belonging to Sir Walter Raleigh, knight. Leaving Plymouth on the 10th June 1586, we directed our course in the first place for the coast of Spain, and thence for the islands called the Azores, in which course we captured a small bark, laden with sumach and other commodities, in which was the Portuguese governor of St Michael's Island, with several other Portuguese and Spaniards. Sailing thence to the island of Gracioso, westward of Tercera, we descried a sail to which we gave chase, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr

... them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond a waste of scarlet sumach and sassafras and a winding creek screened in elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left—a large, raw-boned, passionate huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar—was complaining loudly that they had ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... has been generally supposed,—particularly as one of the phenomena that perhaps distinguish the productions of the eastern from those of the western coasts of the two grand divisions of the earth. I have observed that the Smoke-tree, which is a Sumach from China, and the Cydonia Japonica, are as brightly colored in autumn as any of our indigenous shrubs; while the Silver-Maple, which, though indigenous in the Western States, probably originated on the western ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... grasses and the broad-leafed plants, a frost which seared the maize leaves and set aflame the foliage of the maples all along the streams, and decked in a hundred flamboyant tones the leaves of the sumach and ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... upon eggs, and Tattine never knew that they had gone. It was no stealthy treading very long, however. No sooner had they crossed the roadway than they made sure of the scent they thought they had discovered, and made one wild rush down through the sumach and sweet-fern to the ravine. In a few moments it was one wild rush up again right to the foot of Tattine's apple-tree, and Tattine looked down to see Doctor—oh, could she believe her two blue eyes!—with ...
— Tattine • Ruth Ogden

... autumn, when the aster Nods its purple plumes in pride; When the black-eyed Susan coyly 'Neath the gorgeous sumach hides; And the golden-rod so stately, To outshine all others tries; In the mist of early evening Two dark ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... the beech, the linden, sycamore, chestnut, poplar, hemlock-spruce, butternut, and maple overhanging such pleasant undergrowths as the hornbeam and hop-hornbeam, willows, black-cherry and choke-cherry, dogwood and other cornels, several viburnums, bush maples of two or three kinds, alder, elder, sumach, hazel, witch-hazel, the shadblow and other perennial, fair-blooming, sweet-smelling favorites, beneath which lies a leaf-mould rife with ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable

... the clouds which were gloriously transparent, and others loaded with a verdant burden of clambering vines, bowing their branches to the earth that was covered with flowers. On the gentle declivities of the hills were scattered in gay profusion the dog-wood, the sumach, and the wild brier, whose scarlet berries and white blossoms glowed brightly among the deep green of the surrounding foliage; and here and there a curling column of smoke rising from the little glens that ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... like the cream-surf surging the milk of young heifers. But that whiteness, here and there, was spotted with strawberries; tracking the plain, as if wounded creatures had been dragging themselves bleeding from some deadly encounter. All round the down, waved scarlet thickets of sumach, moaning in the wind, like the gory ghosts environing Pharsalia the night after the battle; scaring away the peasants, who with bushel-baskets came to the jewel-harvest of the rings ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... of the year, when the grapes hung in luscious bunches on the slender vine; when country by-lanes were mellow with a wealth of sumach and maple coloring; when Nature was saying farewell in her own sweet way, at once so festive and so melancholy, then Constance and Randolph turned their backs on the din and confusion of the city, and seeking the happy woodlands, ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... thanked him again, and then rode soberly back, followed at a short distance by his two young aides. Although the view of hills and mountains and valleys and river and brooks was now magnificent, the sumach burning in red and the leaves vivid in many colors, Lee, deeply sensitive, like all his rural forbears, to rural beauty, nevertheless seemed not to notice it, and ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... are the Ampelopsis, which vies with the Sumach in richness of color in fall, the Bittersweet, with its profusion of fruitage as brilliant as flowers, and the Clematis, beautiful in bloom, and quite as attractive later, when its seeds take on their ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford

... the unusual sound of wheels, and I looked past the high-growing thicket of wild-roses and straggling sumach to see the white nose and meagre shape of the Caplin horse; then I saw William sitting in the open wagon, with a small ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... found him of the same opinion still. He trod the dust a very phantom, while little leaves of cardinal red spun past his nose like the ebbing heart's blood of full-bodied summer. The long leaves of the sumach, too, were like guilty fingers dipped in blood. But the little man paid no heed to the analogies which the seasons presented to his conscience in their dying. Though he thought often of his curse, he had not lifted it. But when he saw a cluster of checkerberry plums in spring gleam withered ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... But see that sumach. I have not seen anything so pretty this summer; mother must have them. You wouldn't think it, but she is very ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... yesterday I climbed to Heaven upon the shining stairs Of love and hope, and here am quite cast down. My little flower amidst a weedy world, Where art thou now? In deepest forest shade? Or onward, where the sumach stands arrayed In Autumn splendour, its alluring form Fruited, yet odious with the hidden worm? Or, farther, by some still sequestered lake, Loon-haunted, where the sinewy panthers slake Their noon-day thirst, and ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair

... water. It was too small to be called a lake, but it was deep, clear, and overhung with crowds of trees. It was evening, and the sun was getting low. There was a narrow strip of land stretching out into the water. Pine-trees grew upon it; and here and there a plane-tree or a sumach dipped its large leaves over, and seemed intent on watching ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow

... enter the level part of the forest, which has a rich black soil. Great sarmentous plants climb here up to the tops of the trees: wild Grapes, the climbing, poisonous Sumach, (Rhus toxicodendron,) and the vine-like Cinque-foil, which transforms withered, naked trunks into green columns, Bignonias, with their brilliant scarlet trumpet-flowers, are the most remarkable. The Thuja occidentalis, which may be met with in European gardens, stands in mournful solitude ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... sumac (sumach) Shrubs or small trees of the genus Rhus, having compound leaves, clusters of small greenish flowers, and usually red, hairy fruit. Some species, such as the poison ivy and poison oak, cause an acute ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... again, when goldenrod stood brown and sere upon the hillside and the sumach glowed red in the fence corners and thickets, when the fall crickets were chiming their dirge down amid the grass roots and the air was growing frosty at nights, then the Bob Whites grew restless and took flight ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux

... lately much recommended the leaves of rhus toxicodendon (sumach), from one gr. to iv. of the dried powder to be taken three or four times a day. Essay on Rhus Toxic. Johnson, London, 1793. But it is difficult to know what medicine is of service, as the movements of the muscles must be learned, as ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... bright red of some pepperidges shewing behind the green of an unchanged maple; near by stood another maple the leaves of which were all seemingly withered, a plain reddish light wood-colour; while below its withered foliage a thrifty poison sumach wreathing round its trunk and lower branches, was in a beautiful confusion of fresh green and the orange and red changes, yet but just begun. Then another slight maple with the same dead wood-coloured leaves, into which to the very top a Virginia creeper ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... and acres of green rag-weed where the wheat had grown, all so flat one thought of an enormous billiard table, and now, where the railroad crossed the country roads, they saw the staunch brown thistle, sometimes the sumach, and always the graceful iron-weed, slender, tall, proud, bowing a purple-turbaned head, or shaking in an agony of fright when it stood too close to the train. The fields, like great, flat emeralds ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington

... have the window taken right out if you want it." The girl rolled up the green paper blind, pushed back the stiff lace curtains, and opened the window from the top. It was a perfect October day, and Miss Arabella felt the gentle breeze, and saw the sumach at her gate, a patch of vivid scarlet against the deep blue of the sky. At a corner of the window the boughs of an old apple-tree, still green, looked in and nodded in a friendly manner. The invalid looked bright and interested for a few minutes, then ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... said Wych Hazel,—'then you can take half of the rock'—and she walked away to a position as far behind Mr. Rollo as sweetbriars and sumach would permit. That gentleman turned about and faced her gravely; also withdrew a step, looked at his match, and throwing on his hat which had lain till now on the moss, went to work. It was work in ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner

... in war's array, Precede the troops along the grassy way. They chant wild songs, and with loud noise and stress, In savage manner savage joy express. The Indian captives, blanketed in red, On ponies mounted, by the scouts are led. Like sumach bushes, etched on evening skies, Against the blue-clad troops, this patch of ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... their choice of oak, alder, sumac, elm, cherry, and hickory. The majority of them seemed to prefer the hickory. They moulted on the fifth day for the first time, and changed to a brown colour. Every five or six days they repeated ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... sumac (sumach) Shrubs or small trees of the genus Rhus, having compound leaves, clusters of small greenish flowers, and usually red, hairy fruit. Some species, such as the poison ivy and poison oak, cause an acute itching ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... Ccapac was found by the Licentiate Polo in a house where it was kept concealed, in the city of Cuzco. It was guarded by two of his servants named Hualpa Titu and Sumac Yupanqui. His idol or guauqui was called Huaraqui Inca. It was a great image of gold, which has not been found up ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa

... black dye three ingredients were used: yellow ochre, pinion gum and the leaves and twigs of the aromatic sumac (thus aromatics). The ochre is pulverized and roasted until it becomes a light brown, when it is removed from the fire and mixed with an equal quantity of pinion gum. This mixture is then placed on the fire and ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... before her, but in despair, when she was seventeen, she began to cut over the old garments for herself and Patty. Mercifully there were very few of them, and they had long since been discarded. At eighteen she had learned to dye yarns with yellow oak or maple bark and to make purples from elder and sumac berries; she could spin and knit as well as any old "Aunt" of the village, and cut and shape a garment as deftly as the Edgewood tailoress, but the task of making bricks without straw was a ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... the Rhus toxicodendron, one being the shrub commonly called poison oak, and the other a climbing vine generally known by the name of poison ivy. The Rhus venenata grows in swampy localities all over the United States, and is known as poison-sumac, swamp dog-wood, poison-elder, and poison dog-wood. About twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the exposure, the skin begins to itch, and this is shortly followed by an inflammation accompanied by the formation of numerous small blisters, and still later ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris

... among other things, devours berries of three kinds of dogwood, Virginia creeper, service berry, strawberry, pokeberry, poison ivy, poison sumac, ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal

... Cochineal was introduced for dyeing purposes in 1856. It is the product of an insect called Coccus cacti, which lives on a species of cactus. Yellow is often produced from Persian berries, turmeric, saffron, and sumac. ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt

... remember once, at the close of a beautiful day's fishing on the Swiftwater, I came out, just after sunset, into a little open space in an elbow of the stream. It was still early spring, and the leaves were tiny. On the top of a small sumac, not thirty feet away from me, sat a veery. I could see the pointed spots upon his breast, the swelling of his white throat, and the sparkle of his eyes, as he poured his whole heart into a long liquid chant, the clear notes rising and falling, echoing and interlacing in endless ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... from her kitchen fire rose white as she put in dry sumac to give it a start. It mounted straight as a plume for a little way, until it met the cool air of evening which was beginning to fall. There it spread, like a floating silken scarf, and settled over the roof. It draped down slowly over the walls, until it enveloped ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... and tasting the satisfaction of labor as never before in his life, the days passed to Gilbert Potter. Then came the important Friday, hazy with "the smoke of burning summer," and softly colored with the drifts of golden-rods and crimson sumac leaves along the edges of the yet green forests. Easily feigning an errand to the village, he walked rapidly up the road in the warm afternoon, taking the cross-road to New-Garden just before reaching Hallowell's, and then struck to the ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor

... bark there are used at present very different substances, such as laurel, chestnut, hemlock, quebracho and pine bark, sumac, etc. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... a level with the surface of the ground; on this they sprinkled a little earth, so that the rat would suspect nothing; over this they placed another flat stone, leaning at an angle and supported by a slender stick, to which were attached berries of the aromatic sumac as a bait. That night the young men sat up very late talking with their father, and did not lie down to sleep until after midnight, when, as their father directed, they lay side by side with their ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... the berries and leaves of red or staghorn sumac and boil them together to make a black dye, or ink. If you need ink in a hurry, you can take the Genus Coprinus, commonly known as the ink mushroom, and pluck it at the end of its first day. The spores are black, and the gills turn into ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... A Outlines of leaflets with two or three teeth at base. Ailanthus IA Outlines of leaflets serrate { Sumacs (except Poison sumac) { Mountain ashes { Walnuts { Hickories I A C Leaflets oval, apex obtuse Locusts (except Honey locust) I A C Leaflets oblong, apex acute Poison sumac I B Outlines of leaflets entire Ashes (except Mountain ashes) I B Outlines of leaflets serrate Ashes (except Mountain ashes) I B Leaflets irregularly ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... gaze, and tasting the fragrance of hemlock, birch, and pine, that floated to him in mingled odors. All he had heard was more than true. The trees were noble beyond description. There were narrow openings and plains, in places, where the sumac lifted its blood-red plumes, and bee-balm waved its crimson blossoms; while generally the woods were ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... next time you go into the woods, and then you should try to keep as far away from it as possible. It is sometimes called poison oak, but both these names are incorrect, as the shrub is really a kind of sumac. It takes its different names because it has the curious habit of either climbing like a vine, when it is called "ivy," or growing erect like a bush, or shrub, ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... are whitish-green and grow in loose clusters from a stiff middle stalk at the angles of the leaves. The fruit is a gray-green berry growing in scant, drooping clusters. This gray drooping berry is the sumac poison sign, for the fruit of the harmless sumach is crimson and is held ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard

... into Europe in the sixteenth century and causes a deterioration of the durable qualities of the tanno-gallate of iron; Brazil-wood and archil, and their allies, are exceedingly fugitive; bablah, the fruit of the acacia arabica, myrabolams, of Chinese growth, catechu, and sumac which though used in the time of Pliny, each contains a percentage of gallic acid too small to meet the requirements. Divi-divi, a South American product, came into use only at the end of the sixteenth century and has not stood ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... around the chimney corner windows. Judith and Jane were responsible for the "Bosky Dell" created around the Inglenook. Here the mandolins were cluttered, and about the walls were such artistic woodiness as branches of bright red berries, then sprays of dark gray bayberry, glowing sumac, deep brown oak leaves, and this applied foliage provided the "Bosky" for ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... began to deepen. The pines accentuated their solemnity, and out on the roadways the hazel bushes and the sumac changed to canary, to russet, and to crimson. For days together the sky would be cloudless, and even in the dead of night the vault seemed to retain its splendor. There are curious cloths woven on Persian ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie

... missed school; that much was evident. So the teacher called him up to his desk behind which he sat in his revolving chair. Willie's face had been red, unusually so, and glowed all morning like sumac seed against its green setting. Willie came forward slowly. With downcast face he eyed a crack in the floor near the teacher's desk while his right hand rested tremblingly against his flushed forehead. "Willie, what makes you tremble so?" asked ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... in answer, as the tall, agile figure of Holcomb appeared above the tangle of sumac, followed by a short, gray-haired man in blue flannel, who was stepping over a refractory sapling that Holcomb ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith

... passed and the autumn came With its goldenrod and its sumac flame, With its tinge of frost and its blood-red blush That made every shrub a burning bush. Then love became passion for maiden and youth; All vision had vanished and life was now truth; And they heard a voice in the flaming ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe

... that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles. In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax flowers and wax fruit, and the protecting glass domes, out upon the trash-heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble-topped tables. They embroidered daisies (which they called "marguerites") and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and owls and peacock feathers upon plush ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington

... began, "and it came from Persia, far, far beyond the sea. The shepherds watched their flocks night and day, and saved the finest fleeces for the rug. They made colour from flowers and sweet herbs; from strange things that grew on the mountain heights, where only the bravest dared to go. The sumac that flamed on the hills, the rind of the swaying pomegranates, lichens that grew on the rocks by the Eastern sea, berries, deep-sea treasures, vine leaves, the juice of the grape—they all made colours for the rug, and then ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed

... through lovely country, mellow in the late afternoon sunshine. Mr. Benjamin talked to the horses in a friendly way, but he left Isabelle to herself. After a little they were among the hills. The sumac flamed everywhere, and bronze oak trees smouldered in the sun. Once Mr. Benjamin drew up and pointed to a flower beside ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke

... drink so eagerly in summer; the copious spring in the bank at the foot of the old orchard which, in the severe drouths of recent years, holds out when other springs fail; the tiny but perennial spring issuing from under the huge tilted rock in the sumac field where the young cattle and the sheep of the mountain pasture drink and where we have all refreshed ourselves so many times; the spring from under a rocky eyebrow on the big side hill which is now piped to the house and which in my boyhood was brought in pine or hemlock "pump logs," ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... is in the octosyllabic quatrains. The last scene of the second act is in the gardens of the Convent of Virgins of the Sun. A young girl is standing by a gate which opens on the street. This, as afterwards appears, is Yma Sumac, the daughter of Ollantay and Cusi Coyllur, aged ten, but ignorant of her parentage. To her enters Pitu Salla, an attendant, who chides her for being so fond of looking out at the gate. The conversation which follows shows that Yma Sumac detests the convent and refuses to take the vows. She ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham

... straight slips made out of white lowell what was wove on dat ole spinnin' wheel. Den dey make jeans for de men's breeches and dye it wid copperas and some of de cloth dey dye wid sumac berries and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration

... square with bastions. The site is overgrown with red haw and sumac. The site of a blacksmith shop was also pointed out. This is an evidence of early French and Missionary enterprise, and dates about 1660. There is a tale of a tragedy connected with a female, at its abandonment. The guns, it is said, were thrown ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... 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 ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... And the sumac spreads Tall plumes o'er the purple privet, I beg a kiss Of the wind, tho I wis Right well ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice

... to be sure," said her brother, "but before very long there will be partridges and hares, plenty of them; and father and Captain Caseby will buy all I shoot. And you see, until it is time for game I'm going to gather sumac." ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton

... sumac in crimson arrayed, Whose veins with the deadliest poison are rife! And, side by her side, on the edge of the glade, The sassafras laurel, restorer of life! Behold the tall maples turned red in their hue, And the muscadine ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... She sank down upon the turf. The basket yawned upon a bed of moss, its flannel rags hanging over the edge. Teola was making the babe ready to return to its bed, when Tess slipped under the branches of the short sumac trees, and entered ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... but sheep-skin, stained or colored; basil or basan is sheepskin tanned in bark, while roan is tanned in sumac, and most of the so called moroccos are also sheep, ingeniously grained by a mechanical process. As all the manufactures in the world are full of "shoddy," or sham materials, the bookbinder's art affords no exception. But if the librarian or collector patronises ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... wander about the shores of the island at the marsh line to find strange evidence of this gift-bearing propensity of the shy tides. Trinkets of all sorts that they gather in travels in distant seas the tides bring and lay lovingly at the roots of black oak and sweet gum, hickory and stag-horn sumac. Here is bamboo that for all I know grew near the head waters of the Orinoco, though it may have sprouted in the Bahamas, floated north by the Gulf Stream, shunted from its warm edge into the chill of the Labrador current and drawn thence by the Cohasset ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... the side of the road, near the clump of blackberry vines and sumac growth, lay my father, a long dark blot, motionless, awesome, as I could see by the light of the moon, now just rising in a gap of the distant mountains. I sprang down and ran to him, lifted his head, called to him in a voice so hoarse I ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... it meant to me, and enter so deeply into their lives? No doubt it can, hard as it is to believe it. The "Bundle place," the "barn on the hill," the "Deacon woods," the clover meadow, the "turn in the road," the burying-ground, the sheep-lot, the bush-lot, the sumac-lot, the "new-barn meadow," the "old-barn meadow," and so on through the list—each field and section of the farm had to me an atmosphere and association of its own. The long, smooth, broad hill—a sort of thigh of the mountain (Old Clump) upon the lower edge ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... here and there along the road. Flowers bloomed by the wayside and in them Phoebe was especially interested. Goldenrod in such great profusion that it seemed the very sunshine of the skies was imprisoned in flower form, stag-horn sumac with its grape-like clusters of red adding brilliancy to the landscape—everywhere was manifest the dawn of autumnal glory, the splendor that foreruns decay, the beauty that is but the first step in nature's transition from blossom and harvest ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... the passing of the summer. And as the old gentlewoman stood there in the open door of that rustic temple of learning, with the deep-shadowed, wooded hillside in the background, and, in front, the rude clearing with its crooked rail fence along which the scarlet sumac flamed, I thought,—as I still think, after all these years,—that I had never ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright

... aware of the approach of the assistant foreman of Diamond X, but Bud's quick ears had caught the faint sound of the horse's feet approaching, and in another moment Babe rode up from a little clump of greasewood shrubs, which growth, to the eastern lads, had resembled sumac at first. ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker

... for the sport of it, have I followed and found by its scent alone the great night-butterfly, marked brown and crimson, and larger than a little bat, whose head bears tiny ferns, and whose wings are painted with the four quarters of the moon. Like crushed sumac is the odour of it, and in winter it hides in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers



Words linked to "Sumach" :   shining sumac, Rhus trilobata, smooth sumac, bush, mountain sumac, fragrant sumac, Rhus copallina, Virginian sumac, sugar sumac, black sumac, Rhus aromatica, dwarf sumac, skunkbush, velvet sumac, shrub, genus Rhus, vinegar tree, Rhus ovata, sumac, shumac, Rhus typhina, Rhus glabra, scarlet sumac



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