What is interesting about the local Flame-leaf sumac is its role in prairie maintenance. Instead of covering acres like its aggressive cousin in the east, sumac lives in tiny groves about the size of two pick-up trucks. Sumac groves are really clones, because like bamboo, the grove is a single plant, not a collection of different trees. The sumac borg-grove is best visualized as a nomadic cluster of little trees, slowly creeping across the prairie. For more than thirty years I have observed several of these traveling groves and it seems to me that they migrate about twenty feet per decade. The grove extends underground roots, (stolons) forward in a moist year a few feet, then only a few inches in a dry season. The forward end of the grove is made up of the most recent growth, knee to waist high. The tallest trees, about eight feet, are in the middle, then on the diminishing end, the rear, is made up of dead trunks. I get the impression that the sumac terminates its own growth after a few years, perhaps by toxins released in the soil that shortens the tree’s lifespan. These same chemicals appear to stimulate the growth of little bluestem. When walking into a sumac grove, the first thing I notice is the quiet, next, it seems there is much less wind. I think the inside of the grove is an nursery for grasses. The grove leaves in its wake the tallest little bluestem that I’ve seen in Erath County – waist high.