Plantidote of the Day 2012-06-18
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Magnolia virginiana
Magnolia
If you like flowers the size of dinner plates, you'll love magnolias. They're beautifully fragrant, and visually spectacular -- tall (as in 50 or 60 feet high) with huge, shiny, deep green leaves. And those flowers! I see why people love these trees. But ... but ... there is one small problem ...
You'll need a live-in gardener to clean up after a magnolia. The leaves and flowers turn tobacco brown and fall off, creating heaps of litter. Meanwhile, the "fruiting bodies" (that thing in the center of the blossom, which is the size of a shaving brush) drop off at some point, and fill in any empty spaces the leaves and blossoms haven't covered. Here in Zone 10, the process seems to go on all year. These trees are suitable for Zones 5 - 10, so maybe in other areas, they're a little easier to live with. Anyone have a magnolia experience to add?
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Comments
I have magnolias up here in Maine!
But they aren't the size of dinner plates, that's for sure!
Maybe I have small dinner plates --
but these flowers are colossal! I wanted to shoot it next to some ordinary flower, so you could see the size, but the magnolia blossoms were way too high up in the tree to grab one. Maybe another time -- it's pretty impressive!
leaf drop fools people
I take care of a large estate garden and every summer, I get a panic phone call from the owners telling me that their lovely row of Magnolias are dropping their leaves!
I have to remind them ( every year for 7 years now) that "evergreen trees" do indeed shed their old leaves while growing new ones.
Sighs of relief all around.
When their leaves drop they crash to the ground and never seem to compost down. The litter is non-stop except for maybe a few weeks in winter! It's best to plant this tree with shrubby groundcover beneath to "eat" all that tree litter.
Funny, that's how I ended up growing mine
I like it when the right thing happens by accident.
You're right, insanely, the leaves do crash to the ground,
I've heard them and it sounds like someone dropped something substantial.
Shrubby groundcover -- what a great idea! I should do that under the liquidambars -- they're still dropping the spiny seedballs or whatever they are -- horrible things!
spiny seedballs on liquidamber
Those nasty Liquidamber
things can cause you to turn an ankle or slide around
like the 3 stooges in a room full of marbles.
Whoop whoop whoop!
A note on the Magnolia debris...those leaves make stunning wreaths and garlands for Christmas decorations.
Last forever!
I planted one this year
But it won't grow to 50 or 60 feet (i've seen them at perhaps 20 here) and it won't be evergreen ... because winter.
It's now a subject of debate, but for a long time it was thought that the magnolia was the closest representation of primitive - if not the first - angiosperms. It will be tough for paleobotanists to definitively say what was the first flowering plant and what it looked like, but the magnolia is ancient.
20 million year old fossils have been found and identifiable members of the family are confirmed at 95 million years. I can't remember where i read this, but i read that it did well in N. America because it's natural range is in the Appalachian Mountains, meaning that it was not blocked by an E-W mountain range and could move with a changing climate.
Anyway, here's an interesting layman's read on the paleobotany debate:
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/15/scienc...
i love magnolias
as long as they're in someone else's yard, preferably in another neighborhood.
we have lots of them here, they're pretty to look at, they're huge, they provide shade... but ugh, cleaning up after them is a pain. i had one in the yard of a house i used to live in - i tried turning the leaves into compost by first running over them [and over them and over them and over them] with the lawn mower. i did at least learn how to sharpen my own lawn mower blades that year.