Nature is Never Spent

The wisteria has been blooming like crazy for a couple of weeks now. When I say "like crazy"... not only does this vine overtake entire large trees, it will swamp a whole section of a forest if it's permitted. And when it blooms, it blooms. It seems like every inch of the fine is sprouting a large cluster of bubbly purple blossoms like a heavily laden grapevine.



It can get out of control and become a nuisance, but I think most people don't really want to treat it as an invasive pest because it's pretty, sure, but most of all it smells wonderful. It's a sweet scent and not too heavy but it travels. I'm often alerted to the presence of wisteria nearby not by seeing it, but by smelling it. Then I can look around and find it.

There's no smell like an August evening. It's predominantly the smell of sweet hay from the sun-burned grass. It's got notes of dust and insects and the things that eat insects. It smells like finely aged sunlight, really.

The summer I was seven, we moved here from the other side of an ocean. Alongside the bewilderment of heat and shale stones and pine needles, the wonder of scorpions and toads and unsupervised bike riding, the smell of deep summer is the thing I remember most.

Early one morning last week, I was walking across campus. It was cloudy and a little breezy. In one gust of wind, I caught a sweet scemt that made me look around for someone who might have been wafting perfume. There was no one, and when I had more time to identify the scent, I realized it must be mimosa blossoms. Finally I saw them, at least 100 yards away across two parking lots and at the edge of the wooded creek that runs through campus.

From a distance, a mimosa tree in blossom looks like it has dollops of pink frosting all over its dark green feathery leaves. Up close, the blossoms are very exotic: a puffball or pompom of long, thread-thin stamens that are white near the base and pink at the ends.



They should look exotic, since they're from southeast Asia and apparently are more properly called the Persian silk tree, Albrizia julibrissin, though I've never heard that. They're actually a kind of legume and as such can fix nitrogen, but they were introduced here in 1745 as an ornamental. They've naturalized all over the eastern half of the U.S. as far north as New Jersey and are prolific. Each one of those blossoms eventually produces a long, flat bean pod which holds six or seven flat brown seeds. Young mimosa seedlings sprout easily, and if they don't find good conditions in one place in one year, they can hang around and sprout years later if they need to. I've seen feathery little mimosa seedlings coming up ten years after all the adult mimosas in the area had died of disease.

Mimosa blossoms are a strong visual and scent sense-memory for me. We had a few trees growing on our land when I was young, and they were short and spreading and made great climbing trees. The blossoms fascinated me, so I inspected them closely. My dad considered the trees a nuisance because of the way the dead blossoms would stick to and stain the paint on vehicles and the seed pods which clogged up the rain gutters in the middle of summer. The wood isn't even good for firewood because it's so light and corky. But I didn't know anything about introduced species and nuisance plants. I was fond of those trees.