Angel's Hair Mimosa

Here is another very neat plant for your garden -- Calliandra calothyrsus, commmonly known as angel's hair mimosa (pelo (or, cabello) de angel). It captured my imagination the very first time I saw it. I don't remember where it was, but I was in a garden at an ecoloodge somewhere in Costa Rica. It was early morning and I was out looking for birds. A shaft of sunlight shown down through the shadows onto some dewy blossoms. The bright red staminal filaments glistened spectacularly, like one of those fiber optics lamps. At breakfast I told the rest of our group about the dazzling flowers I had seen. "come on, come on," I said. "You simply have to come and see this amazing tree . . . the flowers are absolutely psychedelic." But by then the garden was flooded with light and the blossoms, though still very pretty, could not compare with what I had seen an hour earlier. It was impossible to capture the moment.

Fiber optic light (see any resemblance?)

One morning, not long after moving to our new home in Concepción de San Rafael de heredia, my wife, Maria, and I were out walking on Ciénega Road, which follows an intermittent mountain stream. We noticed several angel's hair mimosa growing wild near the stream, and it just happened to be the right time of year for them to bloom (late in the rainy season). Maria pulled up several young saplings and brought them home. The tree seemed to like moist soil and partial shade. We looked around our property and found the right spot. She planted several of them, and one survived (I accidentally cut down some of them, not recognizing them among the weeds). A year later it is over ten feet tall and has set out a large array of blooms. When the buds first appeared the grayish saltators (a type of bird) began eating them (the locals call them "point eaters (come puntas). But the birds eventually moved on to other types of buds to eat.

Angel's hair mimosa is native to Central America and Mexico. I bears beautiful feathery leaves on thornless branches. The leaves fold up in the evening. It grows rapidly and can reach 12 meters in height. It can get a little straggly and weedy looking -- we might try pruning it in the future to give it some kind of shape. It can tolerate a wide range of soils, but does not tolerate poor drainage, and grows in either light shade or full sun. It can be grown from sea level to over 5,000 feet, but seems to do best at the higher elevations.

The Calliandra mimosa genus has about 200 species and it is in the fabaceae (legume) family. These trees take nitrogen from the air and with the help of bacteria growing in their roots, fix nitrogen into the soil -- a good tree to have around. It is occasionally grown as a shade tree in coffee plantations and in hedgerows.

Angel's hair can be started either from seeds or seedlings. The seeds should be soaked in cold water for 48 hours (some say soaking it in very hot water for several hours works too). Many Costa Rican gift shops carry small packets of the seeds, distributed by El Arca Verde de la Plantas, S.A. I went ot the web site printed on the package, but was unable to pull up any information about the company.

Happy gardening!