Flower:

Compact branching clusters of short-stalked flowers at branch tips, usually emerging before the leaves, with male and female flowers on separate plants (dioecious); sometimes a plant has perfect (bisexual) flowers. All flowers are ~1/8 inch long with 5 pale yellow to greenish petals. Male flowers have 5 yellow-tipped stamens, female flowers have a 3-parted style in the center, perfect flowers have both. The calyx cupping the flower has 5 short, pointed to rounded lobes and is variously hairy.

Leaves and stems:

Leaves are alternate and palmately compound with 3 leaflets, the terminal leaflet largest. Leaflets are up to ~3 inches (to 8 cm) long and ~1 inch wide, somewhat variable in shape from egg-shaped to oval-elliptic to diamond-shaped in outline, tapered to rounded at the base, and stalkless or nearly so. Edges have a few shallow, rounded lobes or large pointed teeth. The upper surface is hairless, glossy or dull, the lower short-hairy when young. Leaves are fragrant when crushed and turn red in fall.

Twigs are hairy and reddish brown the first year. Showy flower buds develop in summer, cylindric clusters of reddish scales that will open the following spring.

Older bark is thin, gray to gray-brown and smooth with scattered lenticels (pores). Stems are single or multiple from the base, usually much branched. Thickets are often formed from root suckers.

Fruit:

Fruit is a tight cluster of hairy, berry-like drupes, each less than ¼ inch (4 to 5 mm) in diameter and containing a single seed. Fruit ripens to deep red and may persist through winter and into the next season.

Notes:

Fragrant Sumac is not native to Minnesota, but is in neighboring states and is widely available in the garden trade. The leaves are pretty distinctive and the fruit clusters, when present, are a dead give-away it is a Sumac. There are 3 or 4 varieties, depending on the reference, the most common in the eastern half of the US, and the only one recorded in Minnesota to-date, is var. aromatica. Of the others, var. arenaria has a limited range centered in Illinois, var. serotina ranges from Nebraska and eastern Colorado to the Mississippi River and south to Texas, var. trilobata (a.k.a. Rhus trilobata) is present in the western half of the US.

The vars are apparently distinguished by growth habit (erect or prostrate), hairiness of various parts, terminal leaflet size and shape, whether the leaflet lobes are rounded or pointed, size of fruit, and whether flowers emerge before, with or after the leaves. My own limited experience with plants in Missouri and South Dakota just leaves me perplexed, since those observations didn't seem to fit the descriptions of any one var. Cultivars in the garden trade add more variables to this mix, of course.