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Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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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.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 6–9
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moderate
Vertical layer
Sub-Canopy- Soil pH
- 5–8
- Plant type
- Deciduous Tree
- Mature height
- 20–40 ft
- Mature spread
- 20–50 ft
- Plant spacing
- 24–60 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Both
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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