A deciduous tree about 30 feet tall with a layered structure, A. julibrissin imparts a distinctly tropical feeling to any garden it grows in. Although the silk tree is very slow to leaf out, waiting often until late May or early June, it eventually produces fernlike doubly compound leaves consisting of hundreds of small leaflets. Powder-puff pink flowers appear during most of the summer. Michaux's tree flourished throughout the Southeast, becoming a weed in fact. Today, webworms infest it, and it is often killed by a vascular wilt disease.
Authorities advise against planting it.
His seeds had probably come from trees in warm, dry Iran, at the extreme western edge of the silk tree's native range. But that range is wide, covering tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions. In 1918 E.H. Wilson found a silk tree growing just north of the natural limits of the species in the garden of the Chosen Hotel in Seoul. The arboretum looks for seed from the hardiest races of species thought too tender for Boston. Charles Sargent wanted badly to grow the cedar of Lebanon, that stately, umbrageous ornament of English estates.