Wattles deserve a better break

"Get rid of that," a friend ordered, gesticulating wildly at my much-loved, carefully nurtured silk tree. "Can't have wattles everywhere you know."
"Um, it's actually an albizia," I muttered, but he didn't hear me, and even if he had he probably would have thought it just as bad. The albizia was in leaf but not in flower so it was an easy mistake to make, and he'd have been perfectly justified if he'd only seen what I was cultivating on the other side of the property.
Having disposed of a zillion pawlonia suckers and heaps of gorse on the bank of our stream, we were left with a grassy mound, an agave, two rocks and a rotting garden seat.
Behind them, the only tree left on the southern bank - a wattle.
The Gardener was going to cut it down, but I demurred - it was a beautiful pyramid shape, it had just produced the first of its buttery yellow flowers and the birds were loving it.
And it reminded me of the first tree I ever really owned - a similar wattle in the garden of my first home in Dunedin.
That wattle took about four years to reach 3m, but this one made it to 4m in 18 months.
It's a black wattle (Acacia mearnsii), introduced to New Zealand for the tannin its bark produces. However a fungus disease made it uneconomic to grow for the tanning industry.
Black wattle seeds survive in the soil for more than 50 years and it germinates following soil disturbance. For that reason (especially if you live in the Far North), friends will tell you your wattle will have to go.
If you feel like defending it, then it does have its good points - it attracts birds and bees, and it's not poisonous to humans or animals, which is always a consideration where we live with our bizarre collection of SPCA rejects.
Fortunately, there are some wattles you can grow without risking ecological estrangement, depending where you live.
My mother in Dunedin grew the ovens wattle (Acacia pravissima) and I'm determined to have one too. It has unusual triangular leaves on a small, spreading tree, and it'll do the same fluffy yellow flowers in late winter/early spring as my common old black wattle.
The sallow wattle (Acacia floribunda) is a bushy tree with heaps of scented, yellow flowers. I'm keen to try this because I love fragrant trees. It will grow 5m in five years in wet conditions and on coastal sites.
Acacia baileyana has gorgeous blue-green foliage, the characteristic yellow flowers and is well known as an ornamental tree. The winter flowers are great for bees and, again, it's unlikely to poison anyone.
Quite accidentally, we've been amazingly successful with Acacia melanoxylon, the blackwood wattle. It's hugely popular as an ornamental and fuel timber tree, so I should not have been surprised that a couple of years of growth turned our five specimens into a dense forest.
They would have grown about 7m in five years had we let them on our sheltered, fertile site, and eventually to 20m. But their rapid growth had shaded other plants (yes, bad planning on our part) so we whacked them down and now they warming our toes before the log burner.