Sunday, August 17, 2008

#23 Mimosa

When I was little (the theme of a lot of this!) we had two mimosa trees in front of our house in Texas. When we moved to New Mexico (to EspaƱola) my mom kept trying to transplant some there but they wouldn't live. Nobody there had one.

Ninety miles south, though, in Albuquerque, they will (and do) grow.



This is a baby of our neighbor's mimosa. We had some at our old house, also offspring of our neighbor's tree there, and we moved them to the back after they came up in the front flowerbed. They're big, at our old house, and healthy. At our new house, smaller but last year and this year there were blooms.

When I was in a verdant southern state I commented on mimosa trees growing wild in low places and said I thought they were wonderful, and a local said they were trailer trash trees. Maybe where trees are plentiful, they're not in the top ten. But here where trees are rare and valuable, if one of those comes up on its own, I'm personally going to water it and try to keep it safe from foot traffic and lawn mowers!

5 comments:

Christina said...

We had a lovely little mimosa tree in our front yard in our neighborhood in Bucks County, PA, when I was growing up in the seventies and early eighties. My southern mama loved the tree, and her genteel sensibilities would be horrified to hear that it is considered a "trailer trash tree" anywhere! : )

Heather's Moving Castle said...

My best friend for most of my childhood (she lived next door) in Houston had a mimosa tree in her yard. We used to climb it and hang ourselves upside down from it. It was one of my favorite trees. About 2 years ago we planted a similar tree in our backyard in Iowa. I will take a photo of it for me 100 species. It is a sumac tree. It has red coned flowers on it now. It is a smaller tree with branches like a mimosa.

Thanks for sharing!

Sandra Dodd said...

Our next door neighbors at our old house had a stand of mimosas, probably four had grown together into one big tree, and Holly would climb in it when she was little. She and Marty asked very nicely for permission, and our neighbor Mo (who spoke on history at the Live and Learn conference in Albuquerque, so some of my readers will have that connection) was happy to have them climb in it!

Our front yard only had a blue spruce (species coming in the second 25, soon!) and it's not any good for climbing.

The Backyard Gardener said...

Beautiful photo. I wonder if you have new photos of it now and if you ever prune to control size. I wish we had these trees up North.

Sandra Dodd said...

I don't prune them, but that one died. Perhaps my husband helped it a bit...

It was growing leaning over the sidewalk and that wasn't going to be good, ever. I think it was bumped too hard by a mower.

It has three of its own offspring (from seed, I think; I don't think they come up from roots) in the same spot. :-)

I thnk they're cousins of ferns, and as they get tall their branches are higher off the ground.

The biggest ones I know aren't all that big, in New Mexico.