This week on Flora and Fauna Friday it’s a sassy shrub with a soft drink pedigree, Sassafras (Sassafras albidum).
Sassafras is a large shrub or small tree, depending on how you slice it, that’s found throughout the entire Eastern United States, except south Florida. It grows well on sandy uplands, especially those that can retain a little moisture. The trees themselves have a roughly straight trunk, usually with a few kinks or twists for style, and can exceed 40 feet in height in ideal conditions. However, much of what you’ll find in the Lowcountry will be lucky to reach 20 feet high. The leaves are a little under hand-sized, deciduous, simple, emerald-green, and with a matte to semi-gloss surface. The leaves themselves are trilobic and trimorphic. Meaning they usually have three lobes, thus resembling a flattened turkey foot, but they can take on two other shapes; a simple oval leaf and a two-lobed “mitten”. Our Mulberry tree’s also exhibit this same polymorphic leaf shape but the entire, untoothed margin of Sassafras makes it easy to identify by leaf alone. Sassafras is most often found growing in the understory of upland woods, with larger trunks being found on forest edges or clearings. Sassafras are clonal and will spread laterally by their roots into loose thickets. Sassafras blooms in early-spring, bearing twig tip clusters of tiny greenish-yellow flowers.
In the Lowcountry, Sassafras is our most widely used host plant for the Spicebush Swallowtail, whose snake mimicking caterpillar can be found folding sassafras leaves from late-spring into fall. Sassafras also has historical culinary significance to humans. Sassafras roots, as well as bark, contain a substance called Safrole. This compound is the primary flavoring in traditional root beer. Traditional root beer was a slightly alcoholic brew, usually consisting of water mixed with some form of sugar (usually molasses), sassafras root, and yeast. However, Safrole has been deemed to be mildly carcinogenic and so modern root beer recipes omit the namesake root altogether.
