It is bloom time for the Southern magnolia. Last year I first noticed these beautiful, ivory flowers on May the 20th, or so my journal tells me. This year, I saw the first flower just before Mother’s Day.
Whatever their official start date, for me these enormous blossoms are the signal that summer is here. The air has changed dramatically in just the past week, so that, for example, yesterday, photographing the red cabbages in the “cool” of the morning I felt the first sheen of humidity-induced perspiration on the nape of my neck.
Earlier today, I stood out on the front porch and knew a storm was imminent, although the sky looked perfectly innocent of any such intention. There was a particular hot and heavy stillness that my skin knows very well, even after many intervening months in which to forget. Sure enough, less than a half-hour later, thunder pierced that eerie calm.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Southern Magnolia, allow me to make the introductions. Magnolia grandiflora is an ancient species of tree whose natural range is limited to the extreme southeastern corner of the United States. However, because it is rather adaptable, you can now find this lovely tree much further afield, and wherever it thrives, it is considered a subtropical indicator tree.
Its foliage is tough, leathery and evergreen, with a shiny dark green upper side and a paler green, velvety underside which appears more rust-colored as the brown, fuzzy coating ages. Mature trees shed some of these leaves all year round, from the interior of the canopy, which is why if you’re growing it in your yard, you may not want to prune the lowest-hanging branches, but allow them to drape naturally.
Otherwise, you will be continually picking up the fallen leaves, as I can attest from personal experience.
The blossoms of Magnolia grandiflora easily live up to their horticultural name. “Grandiflora” is Latin for big flower, and each of these cream-colored beauties is huge. I used to be able to say truthfully that they were the size of my head, but my head has sadly gotten bigger over the years, and now I can only say that they fall into a range of 8 to 12 inches (20-30 cm) in diameter, which sounds much less interesting.
Still impressive, though.
Why are the blossoms so huge? Because this is an ancient species. It is thought that the first magnolias developed around 95 million years ago. (For a comparison, the first oaks probably appeared just over 40 million years ago.) That’s so far back that there were no bees yet. So magnolia flowers evolved to attract some of the first available pollinators: beetles.
Anticipating visits from beetles, who like to chew and can be, let’s face it, rather hard on a plant, the magnolia flower has no distinct petals or sepals, but a rather tougher intermediary for which the botanists coined a special name: tepals. The reproductive structures are also large and strong, designed to withstand the onslaught of gnawing, crawling beetles and still manage to produce the next generation of seed.
A strong and ancient heart.
Everything else about the magnolia may be tough, no-nonsense and designed to withstand the practical realities of their time, but the haunting scent of those flowers is pure prehistoric magic.
In doing a bit of research for this post, I’ve seen their delectable fragrance described as “lemony fresh,” “bright,” “opulent,” and “citronella-like.” None of these descriptions even comes close, in my opinion, and the citronella comparison is just insulting. Yes, the candle-shaped, unopened bud seems to indicate a close kinship with citrus, fresh and sunny. But once the flower has opened, the scent is much more subtle and sophisticated. There are hints of champagne, orange, and antique roses, and even a barely-there sharp note, as green as pine.
One blossom can easily scent a whole house with evocative romance. I should know. My mother used to cut a single blossom and set it in a huge vase on our kitchen table, and lying in my bed at night, all the way at the other end of the house, I could inhale that fragrance while listening to the crickets’ serenade, moonlight filtering through the blinds to stripe my face.
Those flowers came from the very first tree that I knew intimately. That magnolia and I had a longstanding personal relationship.
When I was four, my grandmother sent my parents home from a visit to the city with a magnolia sapling that had cropped up on the edge of her tiny lawn. A full-grown magnolia would have meant the end of her lawn, but my parents’ suburban front yard was still achingly bare and new. My father planted the sapling, which he judged to be around three or four years old, dead center in that grassy expanse.
Now, I watched this behavior with interest, and it sparked a hundred questions. At the end of all of those patient, loving answers, two things were startlingly clear to me.
One: In spite of its misleading appearance, the stick with a couple of leaves on it was indeed a tree, albeit a very young one. (Evidence: Daddy would not lie to me.)
Two: The baby tree was probably the same age as I was.
“But I’m taller,” I protested in confusion. How could that be so, when almost every “tree” that met my simplistic definition was taller than Daddy, even?
Dad tamped down the soil in the planting hole with his foot, firming the earth around the tree’s roots, and stood back to see if the stick stood straight. “Yes, that’s true,” he said absently, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “You’re taller than a tree, honey. How does that make you feel?” He grinned at me and went to turn on the hose.
Well, truth be told, it felt wonderful. Like I’d been transformed into a little four-year-old goddess. I know they say every little girl longs to be a princess, but it’s not quite true. Some of us would rather be tree-topping goddesses.
If the lower branches are left unpruned, they will often trail to the ground, resulting in charming scenes like this one, where a lovely flower seems to have bloomed out of the ground.
For the rest of that year, every time I came home from pre-kindergarten classes, I went and stood beside that tree, measuring it up to my own body. It had not escaped my knowledge that I was one of the shortest in my early classes, but as long as I was taller than a tree, everything would be just fine.
After every check-up, I’d pat the tree very gently on its growing tip, or hug its spindly trunk, or stroke the velveteen back of one of its leaves, give it a little praise and maybe a progress report from my own life, and then skip away to do… whatever it is that four-year-olds do.
But alas, magnolia trees grow quickly.
Oh, I know human children do, too (especially if they are your own, I’m told). But we only have to reach five or six feet tall, and much less wide. Here’s a picture of part of a mature magnolia specimen, for comparison. The oldest, healthiest trees may reach 90 feet tall.
Clearly, my magnolia needed to get busy — even if it meant leaving the littlest goddess in the dust.
But by the time it had clearly eclipsed me, we were fast friends. I even wondered, much later on, if my whispered praise and conversations had not helped it to grow so well.
It was a huge tree when it succumbed to a tornado in my late 20′s. I’d been home for a visit, and huddled in the hallway with my mom, terrified, both of us praying the roof would hold as we held hands. The roar of the storm was so loud that when it stopped, my ears were ringing. A few minutes later, I stood on the front porch in shock, amazed that we hadn’t even heard the crash of a 40-foot tree.
My friend lay across the yard and sprawled into the street, blocking traffic. I couldn’t take it in at first. Later I sobbed, heartbroken.
Dad said that the trunk was snapped off at the base “like a toothpick,” and yet the wood was twisted, curled somehow, as though the tree had turned in mid-fall. Now, I do understand how tornadoes work. But in my more fanciful moments, I like to think my magnolia tree deliberately fell away from the house, sparing the roof above the hallway where we sat cowering.
There is an epilogue to this story.
Because the tree fell just when its flowers had matured their crop of seeds, a magnolia sapling sprang up two years after the tornado. It chose to sprout in the rose garden on the edge of Mom and Dad’s property. It is still small enough for a honeysuckle to climb the nearby fence and drape over its lower branches.
But it is already much taller than me.
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