star magnolias

The Magnolia stellata down by the ditch has come out in the past few days.  It is the variety 'Waterlily', which has numerous white petals that give quite a full, starry effect.  The soil down there is silty, and the bed is partially shaded by the willow trees that grow on the far side of the ditch.  Indeed, at times it has probably been too shady.  Some of the shrubs along the border were leaning forwards towards the light, and this winter we took a lot of low branches off the willows.  The magnolia was planted in February 2004, and is still only about 1.2m across and tall.  It might have grown taller given more light, though the stellata forms are reckoned to be slow growers.

One reason it is not larger is that two or three years ago, after it had flowered normally, it failed to come into leaf, and I discovered that a large part of the top growth had died, for no reason I could discern.  I have heard of other cases of magnolias doing this, mentioned in booklets picked up at open gardens I've visited, and it's something my boss has talked about.  I had a young M. lilliflora 'Nigra' do the same thing, though I presumed that was because I was asking it to grow in thoroughly unpleasant clay soil.  The M. stellata 'Waterlily' began to produce new growth from low down, so I cut out the dead wood and waited to see what happened next.  It regrew to make a well shaped bush that flowers perfectly normally, and the 'Nigra' is also recovering, though slowly, having not found the past two winters to its liking.  I think the moral is, if you have a magnolia which suddenly decides to abandon all its top-growth, it could be worth giving it some time to see if it is really dead, or if it proposes to start again from the base.

I like the Magnolia stellata forms, and if I had more space I should grow more of them.  'Jane Platt' is a pleasant shade of pink with slim petals, and 'Chrysanthemiflora' as its name suggests is enormously full, and pink.  I have a soft spot for 'Norman Gould', which is more vigorous and grows larger than the others, with only 6-9 broad fleshy petals.  Its extra vigour derives from the plant breeders' dark arts, it being a colchinine-induced polyploidal form (meaning its cells were chemically induced in a laboratory to divide with more than the normal quantity of chromosomes).  The extra sets of chromosomes somehow confer extra strength.  Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star' fooled me at work yesterday, by producing distinctly pink buds and newly opened pink flowers when the label and coloured tag showed it should be white.  It turns out that this fades to white as the flowers age.  I'm glad I learnt that, before being confronted by some irate customer convinced we have sold them the wrong plant.

The 'Waterlily' is not honestly very interesting in the summer after flowering.  For the past couple of seasons I've grown the climbing yellow flowered Dicentra scandens, up it.  This has typical dicentra flowers in a good deep shade of yellow, and deeply cut leaves in a fresh shade of green, and is not too large so does not overwhelm the magnolia.  I raised it from seed.  I don't recall that I achieved a very good germination rate, but one plant was sufficient.