Sunset, Monday, 21 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I think I might be issuing my final report of the year about sumac, having opened this little can of mysteries in two posts, on July 29th and August 5th. As I have previously observed, sumac is quite the hot topic ... somewhere ... maybe. I actually did receive one note of appreciation from a reader who, while I guess she didn’t describe herself as an outright fan or aficionado of sumac, at least didn’t consider the subject to be beneath notice. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she didn’t seem to consider it beneath the standards of this blog.

Anyway, today on my walk with Flint, as we got down near the [Rivanna] river, in the so-called Scrubby Field, I realized that the ubiquitous sumac trees or bushes had gone through many of their changes for the coming autumn, including their leaves beginning to turn bright red. In the plants that had originally caught my attention – which turned out to be the females – with their flower clusters changing from small green dots to magenta buds emerging out of gold petals – the clusters had over the past several weeks turned a sort of violet raspberry, then a deep red grape, and now a dark rust red. In the middle of that sequence, the buds seemed plumped with life, with a vibrant slightly waxy sheen. They still retain some of that healthy shine.

Meanwhile, you might recall I was beginning to realize the fields were also filled with male plants, with clusters that looked generally similar to the others at first, except instead of fat furled buds these were rather simple yellow flowers, each with five gold stamens. At one point during August I couldn’t walk through the field without wading through shoulder-high braces of yellow sumac laden with buzzing bumblebees and honeybees, the bees stuck all golden underneath with pollen.

With the passing weeks it became clear that the male flowers were being pretty much devastated and laid low by the pollen harvest, while the female sumac clusters were attaining the height of their beauty. I really don’t want to give Camille Paglia any more reason to gloat, but the guy flowers were wasted – looking literally burnt down to dark nubs.

Now the male sumac trees have no flowers at all, and the female trees are showing the shaggy dark red clusters so familiar in autumn.

And since there’s an obvious male-female subtext to this story, I can’t resist mentioning one more thing. Weeks after I ‘discovered’ these (to me) exotic sumac phenomena down by the river, about three miles from the house, I found that the whole time we had both kinds of sumac right outside the entrance to our front yard, where I had passed them every day without noticing.

Which illustrates (perhaps) that Man (or man) will sometimes pay attention to things only when they’re found elsewhere, at a distance, and miss them if they’re right in front of him.

Hear, hear! (Here, here.)

Sunset, Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I guess, having written about sumac, of all things, which probably only a handful of people in the world care about – none of whom read this blog – I’m forced to keep writing about it, just to get my story straight.

Turns out that I was wrong twice (and counting?). I was wrong from the age of 12, let’s say, until last week, while I assumed that the sumac around here was staghorn sumac. O.K., no disgrace, I think I got the idea from my Boy Scouts manual, which was probably written by Yankees. (Staghorn is what they have.) 

But I should have paid more attention to detail when I said that what we have, in profusion down in the Scrubby Field, is scarlet sumac. I think I liked the name. It isn’t. Apparently, it’s what they call shining sumac, or something close to it.

This I know because the leaves have ‘wings’ – as seen here:

The stem has a narrow band of green leaf running up along it, from leaflet to leaflet – those are wings. And the leaflets don’t have stalks. Botany is tough.

And it’s probably not over. I’ve previously described the fruit as clusters turning from the color of gold grapes to two shades of magenta. Well, maybe that’s only the female plants. The field is also filled with what looks like the same sumac, except the fruit clusters are flowering much more yellow – each flower with (I think) five bright gold stamens. We’ll see how both types of plants turn out.

Perhaps the only way I can ever make all of this up to you is to paint the field at some point.

On a different subject entirely, I made an interesting musical discovery tonight while cooking a sauce, for gnocchi, of zucchini, garlic and tomato. The first 67 or 89 times I played Bob Dylan’s “Mississippi,” from Love And Theft, I was just glued to it; it pretty much killed me. But then, maybe because my frame of mind was brightening a bit, the next 23 or 31 times I played it, it seemed kind of oppressive. Great, of course, but a little oppressive.

What I discovered while cooking is that if you sing along with Bob, and sing around him – almost doesn’t matter how – and sing the lines more loosely than he does, perhaps making them a little longer, it seems to transform the experience. Makes it like a new song. Of course, the people who know “Mississippi” may be the very same ones who care about sumac. 

Sunset, Wednesday, 29 July 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I’ve spent part of the last few walks with Flint looking at sumac. Today I was investigating a little bit of a sumac puzzle, a mystery perhaps only a painter would find mysterious. A color mystery.

This was in a place Laura and I dubbed the Scrubby Field – because – it’s – scrubby. (Most of our names for things around here are pretty much on this level: the Muddy Road [muddy], the Woods Road [in the woods], the Big Field [big], etc.) A field just above the north fork of the Rivanna River. Eight or so years ago it looked as if someone had perhaps cleared parts of it expressly for bird hunters – wide lanes were cleared and covered with tall grasses, alternating with areas of thick brush. Now everything’s overgrown (hence the name). One of the most successful overgrowers is sumac – bushes verging on trees, some approaching a height of 20 feet.

In late summer and fall the clusters of small sumac berries, if that’s the right word for them, will be the distinctive velvety dark scarlet. I always assumed this was staghorn sumac, but apparently true staghorn sumac doesn’t grow this far south. What we have is a cousin, scarlet sumac. Native Americans apparently had many uses for sumac, and I once tried to make tea from the clusters, following some Boy Scout instructions, by sealing them up in water, in a closed jar in the hot sun. Didn’t work.

Right now all the sumac clusters are in one stage or another of a visually interesting transition I’d never noticed before. Some clusters are still very immature, the fruit looks like tiny light green dots. What began to get my attention lately was the next stage, as the buds turned almost the color of ripe wheat waving in the breeze, although, with the remaining green undertone, they seemed more like the color of gold grapes.

Now, the color change I couldn’t understand, the beautiful golden clusters, as I saw so many across the field, seemed like they were turning a dull brown, as if they were drying up. This made no sense. This muddy autumnal brown didn’t look like it could possibly be a phase of any progression to brilliant deep red.

I looked closer – in fact, I had to look very closely. There actually was no dull brown in any part of the sumac. What I was seeing was the opening of tiny outer petals – gold, curling back like miniature wood shavings – and then, through the petals, the inner berry. The berries are two colors of pink, like a furled rosebud of a species developed to be mostly soft, light violet-pink with an edge of strong deep magenta. I don’t know if this inner berry in any way actually opens or unfurls, but at the moment it looks as though it would, and show more of the deep color.

So the off brownish sumac that looked like a result of two colors that can’t mix, was an illusion. The artist didn’t intend for us to see it that way.