Drying mimosa branches

One of the things I love about gardening is how you can listen to all sorts of advice. Read endlessly on books and admonishments about planting certain things… and going ahead and doing it anyway.

That’s how I feel about this fabulous mimosa / wattle tree now beefing its way into every picture I take of the spring garden.

It’s huge.

It threatens.

It is a delight.

And Australians are just prone to going a bit soppy about their native trees.

And I just pause there for you to read that sentence twice. Yes. A tree native to Australia.

The genus Acacia belongs to the family Mimosaceae. There are some 1350 species of Acacia found throughout the world and close to 1000 of these are to be found in Australia. Commonly known as Wattle, Acacia is the largest genus of vascular plants in Australia. Australia’s national floral emblem is Acacia pycnantha, the Golden Wattle. Wattle Day is celebrated on the 1st of September each year.

That was from the excellent website www.anbg.gov.au/acacia

The Australian National Botanic Gardens and Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research site. Do have a read.

I can still remember having an almost stand up fight age 18 when I tried to explain that mimosa ‘are Australian’ to my au pair parent while we were standing in front of a particularly impressive specimen at the family home behind Grasse.

I had no idea that southern France likes to claim mimosa as its own too. And I recall (to my mortification) hauling out my passport and showing her the emblem of the wattle branches on our coat of arms on the front page of the travel document. Proof surely that the acacia we were standing next to did not actually belong there. And it came from a country far far away. Mine.

Gad, the embarrassment of one’s youthful over-confidence.

And how blithely one accepts that turning 18 and getting an au pair job with a French family that involved living one month in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, sailing for one month around the Brittany coast on their yacht and then a month near the beaches at Cannes was in some way ‘normal’.

What a ridiculous privilege.

Mind you, the three children were fantastically feral and the two doctor parents were subjecting their kids to endless three month visa-free labour from foreign au pairs which can’t have been a stabilising experience for them either.

Especially from distant Australian ones who insisted on calling mimosa ‘not French’.

I only got the job because I put down ‘sailing’ as my hobby on the application form. Not a very vital requirement in Paris. But the father needed crew for his one month of the sailing leg of the summer as Madame was a distinctly below decks and chain smoking kind of yachtswoman. And the children too small to haul ropes.

So I got the job. And her revenge was to do the last month with her parents near Grasse as I think the grandfather was the concert master with the Menton orchestra? Goodness that was so long ago. I wish now I paid more attention to the gardens in the villa rather than all those endless swimming lessons with the children on the beach at Cannes.

I can still remember the falling onto the breakfast croissants moment each day as grandfather went down early to get pastries and a copy of Nice Matin newspaper and drive the long way back home.

I suspect I was exceptionally greedy and didn’t think that the pastries were for everyone as I sampled not just the croissants but the pain au chocolat…..another mortifying memory not to revisit.

Let’s distract ourselves with creativity instead.

I planted the wattle (sorry, you just have to say mimosa, or acacia under your breath as you read this, I am going to stick to the white Australian word.)

I don’t have a copy of the Australian National Dictionary to hand. But it’s possibly called coojong. But that might only be one type Acacia Saligna. Common wreath wattle.

See what directions an untrained mind can take when all they want to do is show you this..

The tree has settled nicely. Its job was to hide the unsightly wall behind.

Well, not really a wall. More a collection of brambles and rampant mess held up with rocks.

And it is unstable. So I will lose most of the soft fruit orchard above if the mountain decides to shift.

So to distract myself from this huge horrid thought (and we lost some of this wall once during the huge floods of 2013) I am hiding it from sight.

And what better way than to do a wattle hedge?

So far I have this huge monster. And three smaller trees beside.

But the leader was heading towards the house. So David very kindly climbed our tallest ladder and lopped it off.

The wood is so soft that it is hard work to get a branch down without damaging the main trunk.

It seems to just tear away with the weight of blossom.

So yes. I should have waited until it had finished flowering and wasn’t so heavy…

But then I wouldn’t be able to do this with the branches…

A rack of drying wattle flowers.

Two of them. Up in the potting shed.

I used the metal hoops from the old barrel and reinforced the wires onto the ceiling. It is a heavy rack. I didn’t trim the branches as I needed them to hook onto the metal ring. It’s more of a drape than a fixed display.

The scent is divine. Almost too powerful.

And you can see it has a soporific effect on the Perched in the Potting Shed One.

She loves it. As do I.

I can put my feet up from the seed sowing projects and just day dream of Australia.

And try not to relive some of the more embarrassing moments of my feckless younger self.