I was seeing red.

It wasn’t a case of anger, just of observation. Walking along a trail recently, I noticed a scattering of small bright red objects along the sandy trail. Long, skinny and trumpet shaped, their color popped atop the subdued hues of the trail surface.

It was not quite a red carpet, but there were enough of them to ascertain that they were more likely natural than toys or trash dropped inadvertently. Looking up provided the answer to their origin, as I noticed more of them hanging in the trees above the path.

Those trees were sassafras and the brilliant red bits were hanging off the twigs and holding blue-black seeds at their terminus. The botanical name for these elongated seed cups is pedicule when they are a single fleshy form attached to the seed and pedicules when the structure is a stem leading to multiple pedicel. The swelling or cup at the end of the pedicule is a hypanthium.

Plant reproduction, while seemingly simple, is steeped with lots of arcane vocabulary describing a plant’s peculiar parts. In the case of the sassafras, sex is somewhat straightforward.

Sassafras is dioecious, meaning that there are separate male and female plants. Each type can be identified when the tree is blooming in the spring, with males having larger and more showy flowers. Look closely at the flowers and you will notice that the female flowers have six staminodes (aborted stamens). The males have nine stamens, which are their fertilizing organs.

Only the female trees can produce fruit, and only if assisted by pollinators that move the gold-green reproductive dust from tree to tree. Insects are the pollen’s taxi service and sassafras especially rely on bees and flies for fertilization. Sassafras can also reproduce vegetatively through root sprouts and stump regrowth.

The fruit of the sassafras is attached to those pedicles and only turns ruby red when the fruit, which is otherwise blue/black, is ripe. Like a sign or advertisement, the color notifies wildlife that the fruit is ready and it is a vital, fat-filled food. Birds, including turkeys and songbirds, will feast on these nutrient-rich nuggets, as will bears (only off Island, of course) and other small mammals.

It takes at least 10 years for a female tree to first produce fruit, and the greatest annual yields will occur when trees are 25 to 50 years old. Reportedly good berry crops occur every few years, but they seem much scarcer to me since I rarely have noticed those red pedicles.  

Interesting and adored as the fruit is to wildlife, it is not edible to humans. Many other parts of the tree have been used historically for food. The leaves are ground into a powder, called file, and is used to thicken soups and gumbo.  A traditional hot and cold tea was made of the bark by Indigenous people who knew of its healing properties. The roots were employed as a flavoring and was the original spice for commercial root beer, until the FDA deemed that safrole, a component of the plant, was a potential carcinogen.

Author Eric Sloane documented this belief in the ultimate health benefit of sassafras in his book A Reverence for Wood, sharing “when rumor started that sassafras retarded old age, the sassafras trade reached its peak.”

That promise of eternal youth might be a red herring, but sassafras remains a terrific, though not death-reversing tree.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature and The Nature of Martha’s Vineyard.