WHEN WE FIRST DECIDED to move from Boston to Vermont, the catalog of what our friends said we would never be able to grow included almost everything we loved. On their list—which they seemed to elaborate with each commiserating letter or phone call—were hollies, stewartias, paper bark maples, dogwoods, boxwoods, witch hazels, and rhododendrons. Our prospects in hoping to establish a garden here looked very bleak. Had it not been for the social wisdom of the state and the care with which it preserves its natural beauty, we might have felt we had made a very foolish decision. Horticulturally, it seemed we had.
The most dismaying part of this endlessly strung-out list was deciduous magnolias, which, we were assured, would not tolerate routine winters of minus 20 degrees. A few might squeak through, but even those few would probably have their flowers blasted by late spring frost, if winter itself had not already mummified their buds. This was distressing information, since both of us had loved magnolias since we were children. They were features of our grandparents’ and parents’ gardens, and in spring, their purple richness was up and down the streets we walked to school. They were also a distinguishing feature in the older parts of Boston, especially Back Bay, where we had lived. There they really meant spring, in all its floral abundance, and since we were coming to a thrilling sense of our adult life in so many other ways, their freshness on that old city’s air meant gardening to us, another passion among many that we shared.
In the beginning, Weston Nurseries, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, was our main source of good plants, and of all the magnolias they listed, only one was recommended as possibly able to endure the climate of our brand-new, southern Vermont garden. It was Magnolia ×loebneri ‘Merrill’, and we could not have begun our enduring passion for deciduous magnolias more auspiciously. That first tree now stands more than thirty feet tall, with three elephantine trunks ascending from the ground, each dividing into muscular branches that terminate in a mass of twigs. All winter long their tips are decorated with fat, fuzzy gray buds that hold the promise of spring, seeming ready to split their calyxes in any warm spell.
Wisely, they don’t, waiting until the real warmth of spring, which here is usually in the last week of April. The flowers consist of about two dozen lax, inch-wide petals (tepals, to be technical), though they hang so thickly on the twigs that they recall the snow recently deep on the ground. The end of April is an unstable season, and so the blooms of ‘Merrill’ risk being frosted. When our great tree is in bloom and temperatures drop, there are agitated nights, with much checking of the thermometer at the back door. It is an anxiety all gardeners know, for many other tender things have ventured out then. But when, one morning, we realized that the blossoms of our ‘Merrill’ had withstood a night in which the thermometer dropped to 19 degrees, we essentially quit fretting. Come morning, most of the flowers were a full rich white, and not the brown rags we had feared to see.
Most gardeners, no matter what space they are given to cultivate, are also collectors. We are certainly no exception, and since our first deciduous magnolia was planted, we can now count thirty-eight specimen trees in the garden. But the precise moment we decided magnolias were for us after all was in 1973, when an article written by Dr. David Leach appeared in the newsletter of the American Magnolia Society. It was an account of those magnolias that had survived the dreadful winter of 1963, where, in Dr. Leach’s Pennsylvania garden, thermometers reached lows of minus 35 degrees. We set out immediately to search for those that had sustained “no” or “slight” injury. Our printout of that article contains red pencil checks by each, and we located every one.
Magnolia stellata was on the list, and it was easy to obtain, since it was stocked by almost every nursery because it is a good sales item in spring, producing its many-tepaled white flowers while still in a five-gallon nursery can. It has many selected forms, including the pink-tinged cultivar ‘Jane Platt’, which was not so easy to find, but which we located via mail-order from Gossler Farms, in Eugene, Oregon. (Gossler Farms was—and still is—one of the very best sources for hard-to-find magnolias.) Magnolia stellata is one of the two parents of ‘Merrill’ (the other is M. kobus), and another cross between the two species produced the free-flowering ‘Leonard Messel’, which we tucked at the back door, where it would be sheltered from the west wind. Like ‘Merrill’, the nine petals of each flower are straplike, but in ‘Leonard Messel’ they are a fine, bright pink. The tree is now as tall as the house, producing thousands of flowers, even in part shade.
Fond as we became of all these magnolias of stellata parentage, we still thought of a magnolia as possessing the opulent, large-petaled cup of those that grow up and down Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. It was a boon, then, to find one M. ×soulangeana on Dr. Leach’s list in the “slightly damaged” category, M. × soulangeana‘Alexandrina’. We could live with slight damage, if we could even occasionally see its chalices of bloom, rose pink from a distance but actually creamy white washed with pink up close. We planted it near our stream, thereby accidentally discovering a fact invaluable to the future of our garden, that if any tree can accept percolating water near its roots, it gains at least a zone in hardiness. In fact, over twenty or more years, Alexandrina has never failed to bloom, even after our coldest winters.
Working on that same principle we also planted our first M. virginiana, the southern sweet-bay magnolia, actually in the bog formed at that edge of the stream, because we read that it would tolerate waterlogged soil. And so it has, growing into a rather lanky but still beautiful fifteen-foot-tall tree hanging over the plank bridge, and producing its intensely scented twoand-a-half-inch, creamy white, cupped flowers, sometimes at nose level. By now, we had really begun to prove our smug Boston friends wrong, because M. virginiana is usually rated to Zone 6 (–10 to 0) and we were clearly in Zone 4 (–30 to –20). So we planted other Virginia magnolias, and now there are six in the garden, all in boggy places along the stream.
In the mid-1980s, just at the peak of greatest expansion of our garden, the number of magnolias that were hardy to Zone 4 suddenly seemed to explode. As a result of breeding done by David Leach, Phil Savage, and others, there were suddenly more magnolias than we had space to plant. Their hardiness descended from the genes of M. acuminata, the native American cucumber tree (so called for its narrow, six-inch-long green seed pods), the natural range of which extends from Georgia to Illinois. When crossed with more tender species, M. acuminata also contributed flower pigments that produced blooms of clear yellow, introducing that color to the genus for the first time. Suddenly, there was a flood of gold, beginning with ‘Elizabeth’, released by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1977, and the largest-flowered of the yellow magnolias, with huge, butter-colored chalices of bloom. The flood still continues, bringing new magnolias into circulation with each spring’s catalogs.
When gardeners are confronted with a plethora of new plants in a genus they adore, the only possibility is to contrive some special place for them. That prevents the garden from becoming jittery because forms of a favorite plant are scattered all over the place. So we planted a magnolia walk on either side of the pergola that guides you through the woods to the guest house, the daffodil meadow, and the vegetable garden beyond. We could double or quadruple the choices now, but we selected ‘Butterflies’, ‘Ivory Chalice’, ‘Miss Honeybee’, and ‘Yellow Lantern’. (‘Elizabeth’ had already been planted at the foot of the rock garden, far away, and that was a mistake, because she is exposed to the cruelest spring winds in our garden. But she was too big to move.) We interspersed these selections with four specimens of M. ×’Who Knows What’, called that because they are seedlings gathered from our garden, and are of indeterminate parentage. Two have pure white flowers and one is the palest pink, indicating to us that ‘Merrill’ and ‘Leonard Messel’ had gotten together at some point. The walk ends in a single specimen of M. tripetala, the umbrella tree, so called because its vast green leaves are produced in whorls and each measures twenty-four inches long. It is hidden a bit in the woods at the end of the walk, both as a full stop and because its distinctly tropical nature would be unsettling farther down. Magnolia macrophylla has even larger leaves, to three feet in length, but in our one attempt with it the leaves got hopelessly shredded by our spring winds.
Lately, there have been other crosses with M. acuminata, most notably with the rich, red-purple M. liliiflora, which has yielded a whole new color range for hardy magnolias, distinctly weird and haunting, almost but not quite brown, with purple and yellow streakings. It is the blend of colors you’d expect in an orchid, perhaps, but never in a hardy blossoming tree. Of course we are fascinated, and have acquired one of these crosses already, a five-foot-tall specimen called ‘Woods-man’, which last year produced its first strange-colored chalices of chocolate-rose.
Someday, we suppose we will have to admit that we have planted our last magnolia, but on this cold February day, with the catalogs spread before us, it does not seem likely just yet. Surely we can find room for one more. We have at least one spot in mind, behind the poultry house, against the wall of massive boulders that indicates that boundary of our property. Magnolia sieboldii ‘Colossus’ could fit in there, with its five-inch-wide waxy white petals arranged as a bowl around winered stamens. Though usually listed as hardy to Zone 6, like so many other magnolias growing here, we are sure it will be hardy in Zone 4. And like so many other things in gardening, it is a case of “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”