We enjoyed enthusiastic speakers about trees and shrubs in the Ozarks at the Master Gardening program in the fall of 2007. Maintenance and wise planting guidelines that were presented were especially valuable. I wish we had had time to go over some standbys with more detail.
I have been nursing baby trees salvaged from the yard and from special seeding situations.
For example, I never saw a redbud or baby oak that I didn’t believe should be transplanted in a safe place. I have several that were set out last summer and more in pots for this year. But, we didn’t get to cover some of the best practices for maintaining these Ozarks natives. I will have to dig deeper and expand the pages about these trees that will be on this website. We salvaged a dogwood and received another from the conservation trees to add to our yard. For all of the shrubs that had been planted ahead of us, there was no dogwood. We anticipate the development of our little dogwood friends.
We, at our house, are especially taken with the Silk Mimosa trees that also seem to be either native or escapees from long ago. For several years I closing watched little nooks in the yard looking for babies. A neighbor said we were mowing them off, but I don’t agree. That debate didn’t get me the trees, though. In the winter of 2006-2007, I put some mimosa seeds in a pot where they could endure the elements, but where I could find them if they did germinate. During the summer of 2006, we had exceptional pollination activity in the mimosa tree from hummingbirds.
I was so happy, when the warm weather came to summer of 2007, to find little bitty mimosa sprouts in my pot. They look just like their parents. Since we had similar pollination from the hummingbirds in 2007 as in 2006, I have another pot of seeds set out to see if I can get some more.
I have almost a dozen mimosa trees in pots resting under deep layers of Oak leaves waiting for spring. I so want them to survive and thrive.
I wonder if putting them out in the yard with the redbuds will qualify them all as native planting!
