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In between redbud and dogwood there is sassafras

2008 March 27

Three types of leaves characterize the sassafras tree. Photo by Betsy Green Moyer.
Three types of leaves characterize the sassafras tree. Photo by Betsy Green Moyer

By Ken Moore
Flora Columnist

As the pink-colored redbuds are now giving way to the pure-white dogwoods, your eye may catch some yellow tints produced by another native tree that flowers before the emergence of its leaves.

Sassafras, Sassafras albidum, common throughout eastern North America, has a really special plant heritage. As Paul Green describes in Paul Green’s Plant Book, “It was especially fancied in late Elizabethan England because of Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists on Roanoke Island sending back sassafras bark and roots to be used medicinally.”

Failing to discover gold along the Virginia and Carolina coasts, the early settlers, following in the footsteps of earlier Spanish explorers further south, shipped tons of sassafras back to England, where sassafras tea houses became fashionable.

Green also described how citizens of the Cape Fear River Valley used the tea as a healthy spring tonic, prescribed by doctors in the old days for thinning the blood.

Sassafras has an almost sacred heritage among the eastern Native American cultures. Descriptions of uses are countless. Particularly engaging are recent accounts by descendants of the North Carolina Lumbees. Commonly repeated was the recollection “that Sassafras was the most often used herb in their households as they were growing up.” This comes from Herbal Remedies of the Lumbee Indians, by Arvis Locklear Boughman and Loretta O. Oxendine, and is one of my favorite references for North Carolina plant and cultural heritage.

Before the FDA banned its use in 1960, root bark provided the flavoring for root beer. Not banned, however, is the traditional use of powdered, dried leaves for the distinctive Creole gumbo filet.

The Lumbees were one of many tribes that considered it taboo to burn the wood of sassafras, so special was that tree. And I recall a description that it was most important to use a sassafras stick for the stirring in soap making.

While I enjoy sassafras tea now and then, my real celebration of sassafras is that it is such an exceptionally beautiful tree. It is usually missed in the deep forest, where specimens here and there reach high into the canopy. I notice it most often along our rural roadsides. They are easily spotted at this time of year, when the bare branches are tipped with clusters of tiny lemon-yellow flowers, and in the fall, when the leaves make a brilliant orange-red display. In the winter season, you can identify sassafras by its characteristically horizontal-spreading branches with the swollen round-budded tips turned upward, like fingers stretching upward from an open palm.

Occasionally, sassafras may be spotted along the edges of our urban streets. I was thrilled to discover one last week that I have been passing for years without seeing! It is on the south side of Homestead Road, just a couple of hundred feet east of the Seawell School Road intersection. Look for the utility pole and the speed-limit sign. I heap praise on the utility workers who maintain that roadside for allowing that sassafras to remain. Perhaps there are a few local folks who also consider sassafras special.

Email Ken Moore at flora@carrborocitizen.com. Find previous Ken Moore Citizen columns at The Annotated Flora (carrborocitizen.com/flora).

<br /> Clusters of tiny, lemon-yellow flowers adorn sassafras before leaf emergence. Photo by Betsy Green Moyer.
Clusters of tiny, lemon-yellow flowers adorn sassafras before leaf emergence. Photo by Betsy Green Moyer

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