July 2010. Our love-hate relationship with Mimosas.

Woven into the tapestry of hot, languid, deep green summers is the Mimosa. Naturalized in the eastern U.S. from Louisiana to New Jersey as well as in California and New Mexico, the trees line highways and byways and wave at summer vacation bound cars. They grace private and public landscapes with ferny foliage and fragrant, poufy flowers producing a lush tropical touch fitting for summer. Speaking of lush, the chilled bubbly Mimosa cocktail named for the frothy flowers is equally fitting for summer festivities. We can control the cocktail by not drinking or serving it, which would be tragic. The tree, despite its beauty, causes stress for property owners who may become rabidly herbicidal and possibly suicidal when waging turf war against the difficult to harness species.

The Mimosa, formally named Albizia julibrissin, is the femme fatale of dendrology (the study of trees). With a native range from Iran to Japan, it is nicknamed “night sleeper” or “sleeping tree” in the Far East because its leaves drowsily close and droop at night or in periods of rainy weather. It nevertheless has enough vigor to have gustily sunk its roots into American soil since importation in 1745. Perhaps Andre Michaux, a French botanist, should’ve known better than to succumb to her exotic allure, but succumb he did when he planted her in his botanical garden in Charleston, S.C. The little beauty, dubbed the silk tree because of silky threads in her blossoms, coyly batted her pink eyelashes and seduced America with her ornamental clusters, her lacy, feathery fronds, her whiff of fragrant perfume, her slender limbs, and her voluptuous shape. She attracted attractive things like butterflies, hummingbirds, honeybees. She giggled at drought, glowed without sweating in the heat, wasn’t picky about her dirt, was comfortable in sun or partial shade, and grew fast; yes indeedy, she was fast. She vamped her way across America from showy lawns of the wealthy to seedy locals on the other side of the tracks.

The lovely Mimosa has been called many unlovely things like “a category 2 invasive,” an “alien plant,” and a “trash tree.” Oooh, what a low blow! Some communities ban planting the tree because of its lust for land. Give a Mimosa an inch and it’ll take a neighborhood, no kidding. Along with those lovely blooms, Mimosas produce fruits, six-inch long pods resembling beans that remind us that they’re members of the legume family. Ripening in autumn, pods cling through the winter but disintegrate, unleashing hoards of seeds determined to germinate.  Many fall close to their mother trees’ roots, but others have wanderlust and sail hither and yon on water or wind. Some hitch rides in the digestive tracts of animals, which scatter them scatalogically. Seeds, which need a nick or “scarification” to germinate, may patiently lie dormant for over five years waiting for their big break to become a sprout. So determined are the seeds they even sprout through cracks in cement. When land is cleared, they’re vegetative Sooners rushing to claim it first, growing fast, reducing light and nutrients for competing species.

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