Design

We have a lovely native wisteria, Wisteria americana , which is much more well-behaved than its Asian cousin. Chinese Wisteria, although fragrant and lovely, is rampant and invasive, when not carefully confined on an arbor or fence.  It's a memory plant for me;  when my sister and I took piano lessons through our teens (she's now a music teacher and musician), we alternated being at the library, which was just down the street from a tremendous wisteria vine, filled with fragrance in the spring. Wisteria sinesis , now, is a nemesis, something that we remove from strangling native trees and shrubs, and other plantings. So I was quick to recognize and root out these wisteria seedlings--volunteers from some delivered mulch. It may have been a single pod full of seeds, as they were all near each other! Yikes, a vine that not only spreads through underground rhizomes, but also through seeds.  No wonder it's so 'successful'!

This image is from a Texas A&M site about toxic plants On a nature walk on Friday, one of the participants asked me if I'd seen a yellow-fruited tree along a nearby road. It sounded a bit mysterious, since there aren't so many trees with yellowish berries or yellow fruits of any sort around here. I had an opportunity to go by this afternoon and discovered that they are Chinaberry ( Melia azedarach ) trees. There were 4 or 5 of them, all about the same size, so probably planted at the same time. They're striking now; the leaves have dropped, revealing branches loaded with berries. A fast-growing tree, it was often grown as a shade tree near houses, and was used as a street tree in the middle and lower Southern U.S., according to Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South. Introduced in the late 1700's, it remained popular (and revered) as a shade tree through the antebellum era, described as the 'Pride of China' or the 'Pride of the South....