The magnificence of MAGNOLIAS!
These trees have been bursting with blooming beauty better than ever this spring
I’ve never seen magnolias flowering more prolifically than they have this spring. I suppose the ones I’ve seen are those I saw last year and, since they are all a year older, they’ve all grown a bit and therefore would have more flowers. But they came into flower earlier and seem to have lasted longer – and here in Devon we have had none of the frosts that sometimes mar the magnolia’s performance and occasionally bring it to an abrupt end.
Our route to Barnstaple, about 12 miles away, is rural but we meet a few magnolias before we get to the town – a large M. soulangeana at the foot of a hill in a cottage garden and a ‘Leonard Messel’ full of starry, pink flowers at Umberleigh. There are one or two others but as we enter Barnstaple, every other garden seems to boast a magnolia and in the heart of the town there are many older trees in the gardens of what must have been villas built for the new middle class in the Victorian era. They were some of the earliest trees to evolve on Earth. Fossil records show they’ve been around for many millions of years and like water lilies (another ancient plant) were pollinated by beetles.
Most magnolias we grow in our gardens are species or hybrids of species from the East, many from China. They are deciduous and like many ‘blossom’ trees, produce their showy flowers before their leaves. Many of our gardens are not big enough to accommodate some of the larger magnolias like M. soulangeana or the magnificent
M. campbellii, but all is not lost.
My mum loved all the plants she grew but yearned for the exotica a magnolia might bring. Once, on a trip to Morecambe Bay, we ended up in a wonderful nursery at Silverdale run by Reginald Kaye and left with several plants, including a wisteria (now at Glebe Cottage) and a Magnolia stellata for my mum’s garden. Or so we thought.
We’d chosen M. stellata for a small, suburban garden; even full grown, it’s not too big, and flowers from an early age. It was duly planted in my mum’s back garden and it grew… and grew… and grew! Instead of making a small spreading tree, hardly bigger than a shrub, it was more like Jack’s beanstalk, heading for the sky. It flowered for the first time about 15 years later, just two big creamcoloured blooms, though even they did not enable us to identify its species. It had to come out (neighbours were complaining), but meanwhile we’d planted a true M. stellata in the front garden.
We have one here which arrived in the same consignment as our exochorda (see panel). Planted at the top of the low wall that separates the top garden from the terrace below, its branches create a white curtain of flowers. ‘Stellata’ means starry; unlike most magnolias which tend to have chalice-shaped flowers, it has more petals or tepals, up to 20 or so on each flower, which open wide. Our plant has been with us for nearly 40 years and is still no bigger than four yards wide and three high.
Our other magnolia, ‘Leonard Messel’, flowers at the same time but its blooms are pink and open from buds that are almost purple. When we were filming a piece for Channel 5’s series about this beautiful tree, I kept on calling it Lionel Messi. One of the best footballers ever and an outstanding magnolia!
‘My mum loved all the plants she grew but yearned for the exotica a magnolia might bring’