The Garden.org Plants Database

I live in zone 6.
When I plant these, they come back from seed the next spring.

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I live in zone 6.
When I grew these, they come back from seed the next spring.

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Just curious if anybody has had any luck growing this in Zone 4.

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This is probably the most commonly planted cultivar of this species, and even more commonly planted than the mother species. It differs in having just slightly larger flowers with more numerous tepals (looking like petals) of 25 to 30 rather than just 12 to 18 tepals for the mother species.

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There are about 100 species classified of deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs from East Asia and southern North America. The genus was named after French botanist Pierre Magnol. The alternate leaves are generally oval and smooth-edged. The flowers are generally large, fragrant, and solitary. They produce aggregate follicle (pod-like) fruits with large seeds that hang by slender threads when ripe. A single scale covers each bud, and stipule scars encircle the twigs.

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This cultivar does well in the Philadelphia, PA region of Zone 6b and is offered by some larger, diverse conventional nurseries there. It is an expensive woody plant so it is occasionally found planted mostly at estates, campuses, professional landscapes, and in well-to-do neighbourhoods. It gets to about 20 feet high with leaves smaller than the mother species to about 4 inches long and the flowers also smaller of 4 to 6 inches in diameter. It was selected by Warren Steed Nursery in Candor, North Carolina and introduced into the trade by the huge Monrovia Nursery of the West Coast.

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The Southern Magnolia has a native range discovered in the 1700's as from coastal North Carolina down to central Florida to along the Gulf Coast to a little over the Texas border. It has large, coarse-textured, shiny, leathery leaves about 5 to 10 inches long by 2 to 3 inches wide and brown hairy below the leaves. The fragrant flowers are 6 to 9 inches in diameter and have 3 sepals and 6 to 12 white petals. The aggregate follicle fruit is light brown and about 3 to 4 inches long with big red seeds. The bark is brown-gray and scaly. It grows 25 to 80 feet tall with a trunk that gets 2 to 3 feet in diameter. It is a common tree in the South USA, sold by most nurseries there. Some hardier selections as 'Bracken's Brown Beauty,' Edith Bogue,' 'Select #3,' and 'Little Gem' do well in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania region of Zone 6b, and the mother species does well all though the Delmarva Peninsula.

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This hybrid species between two Chinese magnolias is commonly planted in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast USA, offered by most conventional nurseries. Of course, it has a heavy production of the mostly pink and white tulip-like flowers; good smooth, gray bark; nice foliage of leaves about 3 to 6 inches long and sort of soft fuzzy; and large green fuzzy buds. It only develops a poor brownish-yellow fall color. It bears very little magnolia fruit of aggregate follicles with very few fertile seed. It grows about 1 to 1.5 feet/year. There are about 37 different cultivars, but I have only seen a few of 'Lennei' that has dark purple in the flower color. This hybrid species began in the garden of Soulange-Bodin at Fromont, France in the 1820's as a seed from M. denudata (Yulan Magnolia) pollinated by M. liliflora (Lily Magnolia) that are both from China.

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Developed by Dr. Leonard Pike (TAMU) in response to growers in the Rio Grande Valley who wanted more consistent performance and disease resistance.

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Fasciation - that is what is going on with that one bloom.

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