by Lucille Locklin
I hope everyone has had a wonderful summer! It must come to an end, and some people are happy about the shift to cooller weather and others mourn the warmth. I'm in the latter category and decided to sing the praises of one of my favorites, the Mimosa tree, to help send off the season in style. I'm also memorializing the beautiful tree pictured below on the left; it was chopped down a few years ago.
I love the Mimosa tree and always have. To me, it represents summer since its lovely pink flowers come out in June. With the right sort of attention this tree can thrive, contributing beauty and a delicious light scent to the early summer months. [The lovely smell inspired me to try my hand at making essential oil this year. I didn't succeed, but will probably try again next year.] The leaves of the Mimosa are fern-like and very sensitive, so perhaps I love this tree so much because I'm very sensitive too. Perhaps I love it because I love an underdog, and one finds more bad than good about the Mimosa tree on the internet. Proof (if it's needed) that you cannot trust everything you read there!
Beauty aside, the Mimosa has also been made into a homeopathic remedy, first proven in the 1960s. [By the way, the catchy term "proving," in relation to homeopathic remedies, comes from the German word for "experiment," Prüfung; homeopaths experiment with substances in order to understand their curative properties.] In Murphy's Natures Materia Medica, Robin Murphy lists numerous conditions that can be helped by the Mimosa plant (and, as always, the symptom totality must fit):
Allergies. Backache. Blepharitis. Colic. Conjunctivitis. Coryza. Cough. Diarrhea. Enterocolitis. Fistulae. Headache. Hemorrhoids. Hydrocele. Hypersensitivity. Influenza. Otitis. Photophobia. Salivation. Scorpion, bites. Sinusitis.
Scorpion bites? Interesting! And so many other conditions ... clearly, the Mimosa has helped many people in the sixty-odd years it has been a homeopathic remedy.
People nowadays speak of inclusiveness, and this needs to extend to plants as well as people. There is no need to exclude such a beautiful tree as the Mimosa from our local landscapes and I, for one, would miss it dreadfully if I never saw it again. Like anything else, the Mimosa tree needs love or it suffers. If growing under the wrong conditions, it can look lanky and scruffy, its adolescent, too-thin trunk bent over, and it won't produce flowers unless allowed to mature. In more favorable circumstances, it grows into the beautiful trees you see pictured here. To end on a happy note, the Mimosa tree pictured on the right is still thriving.
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