Plant · P-064

Silk Tree

Albizia julibrissin

Silk Tree is a nitrogen fixer with showy, fragrant pink flower puffs that bloom through July and August, drawing pollinators, and it coppices hard enough to resprout more than three feet in a season for repeated chop-and-drop biomass. Young leaves cook as a potherb, the flowers are eaten as a vegetable, and the gum has been chewed or used as a food thickener. Its seed pods are genuinely dangerous, though - they carry a neurotoxin that has killed cattle, sheep and dogs, so every pod needs cutting off and hauling away from any pasture before it can drop. It self-seeds so persistently that its seed bank stays about 90 percent viable after five years, and it is also prone to a fatal wilt disease that can kill a mature tree within a year of the first yellowing leaf.