One sassafras tree grows three different leaf shapes at once
Look closely at a sassafras and you will find ovals, mittens and three-fingered leaves on the same branch. Crush a young twig and it smells of citrus. Every part of the tree is fragrant, a quality that made it prized by Native Americans, European colonists and, for a time, soft drink makers.
Sassafras is a small genus in the laurel family, with three living species and one known only from fossils. Two grow in eastern North America and two in East Asia, an unusual split. The American species, Sassafras albidum, ranges from southern Maine and Ontario down to central Florida and west to Iowa and eastern Texas. Its relatives are the Chinese tzumu and a species found in Taiwan, while the extinct S. hesperia turns up in Eocene rocks of Washington and British Columbia. Genetic evidence suggests the group shares one common ancestor, though some botanists place the Taiwanese tree in a separate genus.
The trees reach 9 to 35 metres, with smooth orange-brown or yellow bark and small yellow flowers that usually have six petals. The Asian species more often carry three-lobed leaves, and they bear male and female flowers on one tree, whereas American sassafras keeps them on separate trees. The ripe fruit is a blue-black drupe. Unlike many of its evergreen, rain-loving relatives, sassafras drops its leaves each year. The biggest known specimen, in Owensboro, Kentucky, stands over 30 metres tall.
Its name was recorded by the botanist Nicolas Monardes in 1569, borrowed from French; a popular claim traces it to the Latin for stone-breaking, though the tree has nothing to do with the saxifrage family. Colonists heard it called winauk in Delaware and Virginia, and Germans knew it as fennel wood for its smell. Jan Presl formally described the genus in 1825.
People have used the roots, bark, leaves, flowers and fruit for food, medicine and scent, built ships and furniture from the wood, and chewed twigs as toothbrushes. The tree mattered to the European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its oil contains safrole, which a review panel classed as a weak liver carcinogen. Deer, porcupines and black bears browse the foliage, and many birds, from wild turkeys to mockingbirds, eat the fruit.
Source: Sassafras
