Mimosa: Breakfast Booze Or Deadly Invader?

Almost immediately after crossing the waters of the Ohio into Kentucky, and even a little bit before that, attentive travelers notice a few changes in terms of the landscape and people.  The "South" is still a fair distance ahead, but the meager mountains of the western Appalachians have created conditions which set the land and its people as something definitely different from either the "Midwest", "Nearwest", or "North" nearby.  The accents change noticeably even in the southernmost counties of Ohio, people get more adventurous with lawn plantings and go after things like Southern Magnolias (Magnolia Grandiflora) and even Crepe Myrtles, and the forest starts changing from the oaks, hickories, and other deciduous trees of the lands northward into a mix of everything from these to pines and rhododendrons and azaleas!

Very noticeable among the changing trees would be the Mimosa, or Hardy Silk Tree (Albizia Julibrissin):
 

Taken beside a BP gas station on Kentucky 80 near Martin, Kentucky. 

It truly is an attractive tree, one which can apparently be grown rather well as far north as lower Michigan and southern Ontario.  I have to admit that when I learned about this nice little invitation, I was gushing over the possibility of having something to really make the passing traffic stop (mind you I already get this reaction from the cacti and magnolias).  I was dismayed to find out that they were yet another beautiful invasive plant, so much so that I began to try to justify the existence of pesky exotics!

I've discussed what invasives are in an earlier post, so I promise not to jump back on that topic again, but the long and short of the message for today is that invasive plants tend to be bad news for our wonderful native plants, plants which can handle our native climate in all its blessings and curses really well.  Some invasives are less harmful than others.  This does not stop some people and even government agencies from going insane trying to eradicate them in grand crusades, which really makes one tend to question the policy of weeding the forest in the first place.  A post for another day, perhaps.  Back to the Mimosa, though, it seems that the lovely tree does indeed have a tendency to take over the lovely landscape of the central and southern Appalachians.  In some cases, they work hand in limb with the destructive plans of human types, being just about the only thing besides Kentucky Blue Grass (Poa Praetensis) to take over land ransacked during mining and mountain-top removal (look it up and prepare to cry).  This is a shame, because the lovely flowers they produce seem to fit right in with all the laurels, rhododendrons, and azaleas.

They do indeed put up a show.  Too many high speed cruises down hills or around sharp turns prevented me from stopping to take pictures of masses of these trees down in Kentucky and North Carolina, but take my word for it that they were pretty abundant.  Sometimes they formed dense groves, sometimes they really, really stood out in brilliant pinks and reds as individuals high atop the mountainsides.  People use them a lot in landscaping too, probably because the further south one gets, the more tempted one is to take advantage of longer growing seasons and shorter frost durations and reproduce something exotic and tropical right outside the door.  I know I certainly go nuts both with my western and southern garden additions, and I have spent a good part of my days in the endless battle against Garlic Mustard (Alliaria Petiolata) and its evil friends; exotics just appeal strongly even to the eco-conscious gardener.      

They really, really are beautiful trees.  They bloom from the the first to the last frost.  I never had the chance to snap a close up shot of the flowers, but the blog "Growing With Science" has a nice post with some good pictures which can be found here.

As noted, the trees can grow in the warmer parts of Michigan and Ontario, and are apparently common in Pennsylvania and southern New York.  They show up everywhere in Kentucky and the rest of the southern Appalachians, and although I noticed them all the way down to the coast in South Carolina and remember them back in the day down as far as Miami, they tend to largely drop out of the scenery along with the mountains.  Of course, down that far south a much larger variety of flowering trees is available to the planter.  Invasive or not, Appalachia seems to have the strongest claim to these beautiful trees.