Fairy Crown 1 – Spring Awakening

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A fairy crown.  A flowery tiara. A chaplet.  A corona for Corona-virus times!  When I got the brilliant idea to mark another gardening season with a series of “What’s in Bloom” floral wreaths for my head, below….

…I was not inventing something new. People have actually been crowning themselves with flowers and greenery for millennia. Take Dionysus, for example, the Greek god of all things wine and too-much-fun (the Romans called him Bacchus). This is how Caravaggio imagined him, circa 1598, with a Bacchanalian wreath of grape leaves.

During a visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles a few years ago, it was a painting by the Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema that made me peer a little closer. In ‘Spring’, from 1892, the artist had created a procession of celebrants wearing floral crowns wending their way through the streets of Rome.  The Getty’s website says: “It is unclear exactly which festival Alma-Tadema meant to depict, but the many references from ancient Rome all indicate a springtime celebration of fertility and abundance, perhaps most resembling Floralia, honoring Flora, goddess of flowers. British May Day traditions were also rooted in the Floralia festival and were revived during the 1800s to celebrate spring and nature in the face of rapid industrialization. On May 1, children decked themselves and their village with flowers, danced, and crowned a May Queen.”

When I was a little girl, I attended a Catholic convent in Victoria, B.C. called St. Ann’s Academy. It was on a beautiful property filled with gardens and orchards that the nuns tended… religiously. (Sorry, couldn’t resist). In my 3rd grade class photo from 1956 (!) below, you can see the massive rhododendrons behind us.  Today, St. Ann’s is a Provincial Heritage Site and ‘events venue’ with a small museum. But my point here is that every May 1st, or May Day, we girls would have a procession through the grounds carrying flowers to a statue of Mary while singing “Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May”. Thinking back now (as an atheist), it still seems like the most beautiful idea, the floral crowning part at any rate. Who wouldn’t want to be “queen of the May”?

It was her own Catholic iconography that Mexican painter Frida Kahlo invoked when she painted her 1940 Self-Portrait Dedicated to Dr. Eloesser.  From the Frida Kahlo website:  “Frida’s necklace of thorns is just a single strand, but it draws even more blood. In the background, leafless broken-off twigs profiled against an opalescent sky look like the dead twigs woven into Frida’s necklace in the self-portrait with the hummingbird. No doubt the dry white buds that mingle with the twigs (and that droop from Frida’s headdress as well) likewise refer to her desolation. Although Frida has flowers in her hair and wears the earrings in the shape of hands that Picasso gave her when she was in Paris, she looks like someone dressed for a ball for which she has no escort.  Frida’s work from the year in which she and Diego Rivera were separated demonstrates a heightened awareness of color’s capacity to drive home emotional truths.”

My photo project, on the other hand, was dedicated whimsically to the Goddess Flora…..

…. as featured in Botticelli’s famous Primavera, circa 1482, with its 500 identifiable plant species.  How many can you identify?

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After seeing one of my spring crowns, my son said I was ready to go to Coachella. I had to look up why that would be.  Ah…. a music festival in California! Of course, they wear flower crowns there and it’s all groovy, except, most are fake flowers! That would never do.  And I did note that some famous floral designers had designed massively ornate headdresses for garden muses to celebrate 2019 Garden Day in the UK. They were lovely, but not really what I had in mind. I just wanted to celebrate the flowering cycle for my garden by…. putting it on my head! It seemed like my inner child was whispering to me, as if Peter Pan’s Tinker Bell had made a perfectly reasonable suggestion about head-wear. So I decided to call it a ‘fairy crown’, and my first edition for April 7th features the earliest spring-bloomers in my Toronto garden, common snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis), purple and orange crocuses, bright-yellow winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis) and the sweet, hard-working little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.  (Some friends suggested I do the series as “how-to make fairy crowns”, which made me laugh. My crowns last as long as it takes to make a selfie, then proceed to fall apart everywhere.)

After five long months of winter, the return of spring to my Toronto garden is a glorious time.  Endorphins rise in me like sap in a maple tree. And while it’s not quite time to retire the snow shovel and winter coat, everything that’s magical about gardening lies in the weeks and months ahead. Each spring I make little bouquets of my first tiny bulbs to create that joyous feeling indoors, too. It’s often still chilly in the garden and cutting a few flowers for the kitchen table lets me explore them up close with my camera – and my nose!  And it always starts with sweet-scented snowdrops.  I made this image for a project a long time ago, using a crystal shot glass from an antique “gentleman’s travelling bar” that my father-in-law gave to my husband.  The caption is dramatic, but not far off reality. By late March, the gardener is parched for beauty; spring lets us drink it in.

But spring teases in our part of the world, thus the common name for snowdrops.

For the past decade, I’ve kept track of the date of the first snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis) to bloom in my garden with the earliest appearance being March 7, 2012 and the latest April 16, 2014.  That’s a difference of almost 6 weeks, illustrating the vagaries of winter in the northeast. No matter when they bloom, there’s still a chance that a late snowfall will cause them to close their petals and serve as an appropriate reminder as to how they earned their common name. Snowdrops are easy to grow from a small bulb that should be planted in autumn as soon as they become available, since they deteriorate quickly. But I’ve moved flowering clumps around in spring with great success, something that can’t be easily done with other bulbs.  They prefer humus-rich soil in part shade, but like to dry out in summer.

But when they flower with all their sweet-scented goodness after the dearth of winter, there is nothing like a pristine clump of snowdrops, which is why the gardening world has so many “galanthophiles” who grow, rave about and trade various species and cultivars of snowdrops.

Though I appreciate that kind of obsession, for me the common snowdrop is perfection, though you must either get down on your knees or pluck a few for a nosegay to truly appreciate the shimmering, white flowers with their green-edged inner tepals. The bonus? They emit a delicate perfume – much easier to savor in a bouquet than in the garden.    

Within a few days of the snowdrops opening, the silken, purple “Tommy” crocuses (Crocus tomassinianus) appear. Here they’re joined by an early showing of the Dutch hybrid crocus ‘Pickwick’ whose fellow hybrids usually appear a week or so later.

A few days of spring warmth and sunshine encourage all the crocuses into bloom together. When that happens, my front garden looks like the Easter bunny arrived to sprinkle crocuses, instead of hiding eggs – and it becomes a favourite spot for passersby to click photos. Because my front garden is never ‘tidied’ much in autumn, it’s a trick to get out and cut back the old stems of the prairie perennials from last year while the soil is still frozen so the little bulbs can shine. But they always come up through scattered leaf mulch and stubble – all good food for the earthworms and soil organisms.

Here are four of the Dutch hybrid crocuses, their names lost in the mists of time.  When I originally planted the crocus bulbs en masse in the 1990s, many were dug up immediately by squirrels. In fact, a few days later, the garden looked like the craters of the moon. Now I immediately mulch bulb plantings with leaves (even getting some from my neighbours’ boulevards) and water them down so the squirrels don’t have a ‘nose’ for the freshly cultivated soil.

When it’s warm enough to fly (15C-59F), honey bees seek out the pollen-rich crocus flowers.  They’re especially fond of Crocus x luteus ‘Golden Yellow’.

Look at this happy vignette, with crocuses joined by Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’.   

Of all the spring irises I’ve tried and lost, this little iris is a true survivor, shrugging off harsh winters and late snowfalls to show off her indigo-striped, pale-blue flowers alongside her crocus companions. Hardy, easy and beautiful, she makes good-sized clumps over the years and is an attractive cut flower in a tiny vase. A small caveat: she does tend to get a virus that causes blue splotches on her petals and is transmissible to other members of the iris family. But since I have none growing near her, I don’t bother about it.

Gardeners in the northeast are accustomed to spring sputtering forward slowly and occasionally backtracking to winter (like this year). It’s been known to happen in my garden, and I shared the rhyme below on my Facebook page on April 3, 2016.

There once was an iris named Kate
Who sulked when winter stayed late:
“I’m tired of the cold and this foul April snow.
Had I known, I’d have remained well below!”

It happens to crocuses, too, but they have adapted to cold, snowy weather by keeping their flowers closed and their pollen protected.

Winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), those lemon-yellow flowers in my fairy crown, have evolved a similar adaption to protect their pollen from inclement weather, as you see below.

The odd snowflake aside, spring has now sprung in my garden and the robins are seeking out earthworms once again.

And if you don’t feel inclined to make your own fairy crown, you can always cut a few stems of these tiny treasures to bring indoors and appreciate at nose level.  Spring is here at last!

Marvelous Magnolias

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As part of my series on spring trees and shrubs, I thought it might be fun to take a deep dive into some of the many magnolias I’ve encountered during my garden travels over the past three-plus decades. As I said to someone, “I spend a lot of time writing about useful sparrows. Every now and then, I like to focus on the peacocks.”  And magnolias, like peacocks, were precious cargo for the earliest botanical explorers collecting seeds and cuttings from far-flung shores.

By the time Carl Linnaeus published Species Plantarum in 1753, thereby assigning binomials (two-word Latin names) to the known plants of the world, Pierre Magnol, the highly respected director of the botanical garden at Montpellier in southern France had been dead for thirty eight years. But Magnol had been honoured in 1703 by botanist Charles Plumier in the naming of a West Indies magnolia, M. dodecapetala. 

It was a time of discovery in the New World, as plant explorers visited the American colonies, sending back seeds and plants in Wardian cases. One of those explorers, Mark Catesby, travelled through Virginia and Carolina from 1722 to 1726, tramping through swampy woods and finding a magnificent tree with large, waxy, lemon-scented, white flowers which he called the Laurel Leaved Tulip Tree or Carolina Laurel. He made a preparatory drawing of the tree which came back with him to England in a trunk, along with drawings of many other plants and a few seeds and herbarium specimens. His drawings were the first Europeans had seen of plants and birds of North America. Some were repainted by other artists, then engraved as plates and published in ten parts from 1729-1748 in a collection called Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.  Thus was Catesby’s Laurel Tree of Carolina, Magnolia altissima, flore ingenti candido, later named simply Magnolia grandiflora by Linnaeus – memorialized in 1744 in the hand-coloured etching, below, by Georg Dionysius Ehret.

Today we know this beautiful species as southern magnolia. I found it in bloom in the Beatrix Farrand-designed landscape at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., now owned by Harvard University. I wrote a blog about my June 2017 visit to this spectacular garden.

Southern magnolia has made its way around the world, including an old specimen in the garden at Akaunui Farm Homestead in New Zealand, which I blogged about in 2018.  The tree grows 60-80 ft tall (18-24 m) and 30-40 ft (9-12 m) wide, though some in Mississippi have reached 120 ft (36 m) in height.

And it was on fragrant southern magnolia flowers near the beach in New Zealand where I found honey bees feverishly gathering pollen from the stamens.

Magnolias feature a cone-like aggregate fruit called a “follicetum”, like the one below from M. grandiflora.  

Magnolia ancestors are among the most primitive plants, having evolved in the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago) with the dinosaurs, and they ranged in places far from where we find them today.  Wrote John Fisher in The Origins of Garden Plants, “the climate in the northern hemisphere remained mild, and magnolias, bread fruit and camphor trees flourished on the west coast of Greenland – 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.” This is a photo by Geology Professor James St. John shared under Creative Commons Attribution of a fossil leaf of extinct Magnolia boulayana, from the Cretaceous flora of Alabama, USA from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL.

Fossil leaf of Magnolia boulayana from the Cretaceous of Alabama – Field Museum, Chicago. Shared from Professor James St. John under Creative Commons

Though we cannot grow southern magnolia in Toronto, we can enjoy its leathery, bronze-backed leaves in winter arrangements like the ones below, on my back deck.

But Magnolia grandiflora was not the first American magnolia species to cross the Atlantic. The Bishop of London and head of the Anglican church in the American colonies, Henry Compton, had a garden at Fulham Palace and was an avid collector of rarities. He sent the missionary John Banister to Virginia in 1678; in the coming years, he would prepare a catalogue that represented the first survey of native American plants. One of his discoveries was the sweetbay,  Magnolia virginiana, with creamy scented flowers. It was used medicinally by the native Indian tribes of the southeast, who prepared decoctions to treat rheumatism, fever and consumption.  It would become the first of the genus to be successfully grown in Britain. I found M. virginiana ‘Green Shadow’ below, growing on New York’s High Line.   

I also found another native American magnolia on the High Line: M. macrophylla var. ashei, Ashe’s magnolia, below. Closely related to the taller bigleaf magnolia (M. macrophylla), it was named for William Willard Ashe (1872-1932) of the U.S. Forest Service. Though we often think of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf as a creator of four-season meadows, he is also skilled at using regionally native shrubs and trees for specific applications in his designs.

Beetles are considered to be the evolutionary pollinators of magnolias, since the plants evolved in the Cretaceous before bees appeared. But bees certainly take advantage of the flowers, as we see below with a native megachile leafcutter bee foraging on Ashe’s magnolia.

The only magnolia native to Canada – or at least the Carolinian Forest in extreme southern Ontario where it is listed as ‘endangered’ – is cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata var. acuminata).  Though it does not grow in the wild near me in Toronto, it is nonetheless hardy here and there is a lovely specimen in the 200-acre Mount Pleasant Cemetery, below. It is much smaller than its southern counterparts which can reach 80 ft (25 m).  Cucumber magnolia is morphologically variable, and the southern form, M. acuminata var. sub cordata, has been used in breeding with Asian magnolias to produce many of the highly prized yellow cultivars below.

The flowers of cucumber magnolia are unusual looking with green outer tepals cupped around yellow inner tepals. They close at night.

The tree gets its common name from the cucumber-like appearance of the unripe fruit, which turns red in late summer. 

Enter the Asian Magnolias

The first popular magnolia resulting from a 1956 cross of cucumber magnolia with the white-flowered Chinese Yulan magnolia (M. denudata) was called ‘Elizabeth’. Created by Dr. Evamaria Sberber at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden…..

…. its soft-yellow, precocious flowers (i.e.appearing before the leaves) marked a new chapter for magnolias.

But breeders wanted even brighter, longer-lasting yellows. This is the beautiful ‘Butterflies’, a 1990  cross of  M, acuminata ‘Fertile Myrtle’ x M. denudata ‘Sawada’s Cream’ by famed Michigan magnolia breeder Phil Savage.

My photos of  ‘Butterflies’, below, illustrate the reproductive strategy of magnolias. The flowers are protogynous, meaning the flowers open initially in the female phase during which the curved stigmas are receptive (top). They then close, only to reopen with the male reproductive organs, the pink-tipped stamens, ready to shed pollen (bottom). Magnolias evolved this system to improve the chance of cross-pollination, rather than self-pollination, thus strengthening the genetic diversity.

I have blogged previously about the wonderful yellow magnolias in the collection of the Montreal Botanical Garden – see “Mellow Yellow Magnolias” – so I won’t repeat myself here, other than to offer this montage of a selection of those beauties.


1- ‘Golden Sun’, 2 -‘Maxine Merrill’, 3-‘Banana Split’, 4-‘Yellow Bird’, 5-‘Golden Goblet’, 6-‘Sunburst’, 7-‘Limelight’, 8-‘Golden Endeavour’, 9 -‘Tranquility’

There are a number of hardy Asian magnolias for our climate (USDA Zone 5–Can. Zone 6), though their early flowering sometimes coincides with a spring frost. Native to Japan and Korea, the Kobushi magnolia, Magnolia kobus var. kobus, is a small tree or large shrub that grows 25-50 ft tall (8-15 m) with a wide spread. I have photographed specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery and at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, ON, below.

The white flowers of M. kobus are considered by some to be the most fragrant of the early magnolias. According to Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Léonie Bell in their book The Fragrant Year, the blooms distill “the ripe mango aroma of orange and pineapple softened by a note of lily, a perfume noticeable many yards away. Later the glossy leaves and gray twigs, crushed, have the spiciness of bayberry.”

The lovely star magnolia from Japan, Magnolia stellata, is related to M. kobus (some botanists consider it a variety) and a good choice as a tree or shrub for a small garden, given it usually doesn’t grow taller than 10 feet (3 m) with a spread of 15 feet (4.6 m). It bears at least 12 ribbon-like tepals, usually white but with natural variants such as var. rosea and var. rubra of pale rose to pink. When I was a young girl in the suburbs outside Vancouver, BC, my mother grew a star magnolia outside my bedroom window. It had a light perfume, one that Wilson and Bell describe as “watermelon or honeydew blended with Easter lily.”  

I photographed one of the more bizarre design uses for star magnolia one spring at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Garden in their “hedge plants” area. 

Ask most gardeners in the northeast what their favourite magnolia is and they’ll likely describe the ‘tulip tree’ or the ‘saucer magnolia’, both names for the widely available, hardy hybrid Magnolia x soulangeana.  Now almost two centuries old, it is reported to have appeared in 1826  in the garden of M. Soulange-Boudin at Fromont near Paris, an accidental cross between two Chinese species, the pure white Yulan,  M. denudata and the mulberry coloured Mulan, M. liliiflora.  On a well-grown shrub, those upturned rose-pink goblets are utterly enchanting in early spring, just when winter-weary gardeners are starved for beauty.

There are beautiful, mature specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, usually flowering in mid-late April, the same time as the early Japanese cherries and native plums, depending on the season. The oldest specimens reach 15-20ft (4.6-6 m) with a large spread.  

I believe this is the cultivar M. x soulangeana ‘Lennei Alba’, introduced in 1931 by Terra Nova Nurseries in Holland.

Saucer magnolias can be found throughout the temperate world. I photographed ‘Verbanica’, below, an 1873 introduction from France at Van Dusen Botanical Garden on May 2, 2017. Note that its later flowering has also meant that the flowers are not ‘precocious’, i.e. the leaves have also emerged.

In warm climates, M. x soulangeana often flowers in winter. I photographed ‘Lilliputian’, below, bred  for its miniature form and flower size, at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 6, 2018.

Now for my personal favourites, the Loebner hybrids, so-named because they were first created in the early 1900s from crosses between the Japanese species Magnolia kobus and M. stellata by renowned German horticulturist Max Löbner (1869-1947).  The one I admire each spring at the Toronto Botanical Garden, below, is the white-flowered cultivar ‘Merrill’. It was grown from open-pollinated seed in 1939 by a student of research scientist and professor of genetics Karl Sax at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Sax named the cultivar in 1952 for the retiring Arboretum director Elmer Merrill, whom Sax would replace as director.

Unlike its slow-growing star magnolia parent, ‘Merrill’ grows quickly to a mature height of 20-30 ft (6-9 m), i.e. less than M. kobus.  The large, slightly fragrant flowers that appear on the bare branches are white flushed with pink, the tepals slightly broader than those of star magnolia. It is truly lovely.   

My other favourite Loebner hybrid is pink-flowered ‘Leonard Messel’.  An award-winning 1955 cross between M. kobus and M. stellata var. rosea from Nymans Garden in Sussex, England, home of the Messel family, this cultivar has more of star magnolia’s dainty appearance, its pink, ribbon-like tepals fluttering in the breeze.  At the Toronto Botanical Garden, there are two shrubs, including this one in a sheltered corner on an inner terrace.

I have been known to spend long minutes focusing on the enchanting blooms……

….. that emerge like floral Cinderellas from the fuzzy brown winter buds.  

There are also a few ‘Leonard Messel’ magnolias at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, growing in relatively unprotected sites.

Now for the bad news:  f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g.  Unlike plants adapted to growing in sub-zero climates, Japanese magnolias hail from mountain regions where their flowering is timed with the onset of mild spring temperatures.  In Ontario, you can have an early spring in March that teases open magnolias, then snows on them, as it did with M. x soulangeana at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in April 2002…

….. or turns those March 2012 ‘Merrill’ flowers in my photo above to brown mush four days later. So a little caveat emptor is in order with magnolias.

The Oyama magnolia, Magnolia sieboldii, with its bright red stamens made its way quite dramatically from Japan to Europe with the German botanist and doctor, Philipp Franz von Siebold, physician to the Governor of the Dutch East India Company.  An eye surgeon who could remove cataracts, he had arrived in 1823 and therefore initially found popularity with government officials. He lived with his Japanese mistress with him he had a child and gardened with his newly found plants on the man-made port island of Dejima in Nagasaki prefecture. But when it was discovered that he had procured maps of the mainland, he was charged with espionage and imprisoned for a year. He was expelled in 1830 and was permitted to take his plants with him (including Hosta plantaginea, Corylopsis spicata, Clematis florida var. sieboldii, Fatsia japonica, Hamamelis japonica), but left his mistress and child behind. If this sounds like a fairytale, in fact Puccini’s 1904 opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ is based on von Siebold’s travails. As for Magnolia sieboldii, it is a beautiful small (10 ft – 3 m) woodland shrub for light shade and marginally hardy in Toronto where I have photographed it in June, but it thrives in milder parts of Canada.

The ‘Girl’ Series of hybrid magnolias were developed in 1955-56 at the U.S. National Arboretum by William F. Kosar and Dr. Francis de Vos.  They involved crosses of one of two of the Magnolia lilliflora  (the Mulan or woody orchid magnolia) cultivars ‘Nigra’ (below) and ‘Reflorescens’ and one of two Magnolia stellata cultivars ‘Rosea’ (var rosea) and ‘Waterlily’.

The resulting sterile hybrids, released in 1968, were named for the daughters of Kosar (‘Betty’) and de Vos (‘Ann’, ‘Judy’, ‘Randy’, ‘Ricki’); the daughter of Arboretum director Henry Skinner (‘Susan’); and the wife of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman (‘Jane’).  Flowering 2-4 weeks later than M. stellata and M. x soulangeana, they are less at risk from late spring frost that will damage the flowers. Of the ones I’ve included below in this blog, ‘Ricki’ and ‘Ann’ are the shortest (10-12 ft or 3-3.6 m) with a 16-ft (4.8 m) width; ‘Jane’ is the tallest at 20-25 ft (6-7.6 m) with a 20-ft (6 m) width.  ‘Ann’, below, which I photographed at the U.S. National Arboretum is the earliest-flowering; ‘Jane’ is latest; the rest are midseason. 

 ‘Betty’ shows the upswept tepals of parent M. liliiflora.  It is a rounded, multi-stemmed shrub.

‘Susan’ sports twisted tepals; it is slightly fragrant.

The abundant tepals of ‘Ricki’ with their white interior hint at its M. stellata parentage.

Finally, here’s ‘Jane’ towards the end of her flowering period; unlike the others, her open blossoms recall the form of her parent M. stellata ‘Waterlily’.  

On an April 2008 trip to Ireland to find my grandfather’s ancestral home in the countryside near Banbridge (see my musical blog titled ‘Galway Bay’), we visted the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin near Dublin where I found the magnificent Magnolia ‘Galaxy’ at on April 26, 2008. A late-flowering, tree-form magnolia with upward branching and a mature height of 30-40 ft (9-12 m), it is a 1963 cross between Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’ and M. sprengeri ‘Diva’.  Like the ‘Girl’ Series, it was developed at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington DC in 1963 and released in 1980.  

I love to visit Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in spring; it’s where my mother and I would go to get our floral fix when I travelled ‘home’ from Toronto to visit her. There is so much to see there, I wrote a 2-part blog called ‘Spring at Van Dusen Botanical Garden’. One of the highlights is their magnolia collection, including Magnolia ‘Star Wars’, below, which I photographed on May 2, 2017. It was bred in New Zealand by Oswald Blumhardt, one of New Zealand’s renowned magnolia breeders. It’s a cross between Magnolia campbellii and M. liliiflora, bearing large, sweetly-scented flowers.

I photographed another New Zealand-bred magnolia at Van Dusen on May 2nd. This is ‘Apollo’, a Felix Jury cross between M. campbellii subsp. mollicomata ‘Lanarth’ and M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’. It is said to have a fruity fragrance but the flowers were too high for me to sniff.    

And finally, on Van Dusen’s Rhododendron Walk on that same May day, I found a stunning specimen of evergreen Magnolia cavalerei var. platypetala from China (formerly Michelia).  The fragrance was wonderful.

In 2019, I visited lovely Darts Hill Park Garden Park in South Surrey, outside Vancouver, B.C.  It is the home of the late plantswoman Francisca Darts (1916-2012) whom I was lucky to meet with my mom, Mary Healy, at the right below, one rainy spring day long ago.  I’m including this photo because my mother loved magnolias, she died the same year as Francisca, and she would be tickled pink to know that they are featured together under all these magnificent specimens.

During my 2019 visit to Darts Hill, I was interested to find Magnolia officinalis in flower, below.  Discovered originally in Sechuan, China in 1869 by French Abbé Henry David (of Davidia fame), it was found again as a cultivated plant in flower in 1900 by British plant explorer Ernest Henry Wilson who collected seeds that autumn to send to his then-employers at Veitch Nursery.  As he wrote later:  “The Chinese designate this species the Hou-p’o tree, and its bark and flower-buds constitute a valued drug which is exported in quantity from central and western China to all parts of the Empire. It is for its bark and flowerbuds that the tree is cultivated. The removal of’ the bark causes the death of the tree and this would account for its disappearance from the forests. The bark when boiled yields an extract which is taken internally as a cure for coughs, colds and as a tonic and stimulant during the convalescence. A similar extract obtained from the flower-buds, which are called Yu-p’o is esteemed as a medicine for women.”  Bark from the tree is used in Chinese medicine to this day.

I will finish this long wander through the hardy Magnolias with two recent arrivals, having been transferred there taxonomically from the former genus Michelia after genetic sequencing determined that Magnolioideae should contain only one genus. Included in that are 210 species of magnolias from around the world.  I found Magnolia laevifolia, formerly Michelia yunnanensis, at the San Francisco Botanical Garden (then Strybing Arboretum) one March long ago.

And though it was a little too bright at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 28, 2018 for good photos, I was delighted to find fragrant Magnolia doltsopa ‘Silver Cloud’ (formerly Michelia) in flower. 

As I gaze out the window in Toronto on this March day, winter is still holding on with a freshly-fallen blanket of heavy, wet snow. But spring is surely just around the corner – and with it, those spectacular floral peacocks, the magnolias.

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Anxious for spring, too? See my recent blogs on tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera),  redbuds (Cercis canadensis and its cousins), and the many native northeast maples.  

A Stroll Through the Maples

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In this third edition of my blog series on some of my favourite trees and shrubs, I’m taking a meander through the genus Acer, the maples, specifically those native to eastern North America.  And what better way to start than with the spring flowers of the iconic red maple (Acer rubrum)?   Always one of the first species to show colour, this tree in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery was sporting its fuzzy male or staminate flowers on its bare branches on March 31, 2010…

…. with a closer look here.  Red maple flowers are an important early source of pollen and nectar for native bees, hoverflies (like the one below) and honey bees.

Red maple trees, sometimes called “swamp maple” for their propensity to grow in damp sites, are generally dioecious with male and female flowers on separate trees, but occasionally a tree will contain flowers of both sexes, but on separate branches. Some trees have even been seen to fluctuate yearly between male and female flowers – something botanists call gender inconstancy.  This article titled ‘The Sex Life of the Red Maple’ by population biologist Richard Primack in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine recalls that this gender variation has been called a “polygamodioecious” breeding system. Female or pistillate red maple flowers look like dangling, ruby-red earrings with their curved stigmas.  I photographed these April 9, 2010.  

I found our spring-flying polyester or cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) foraging for nectar in red maple flowers on April 22, 2016.  However, the length of the stamens and stigmas has suggested to botanists that some red maples may also be wind-pollinated, i.e. not entirely dependent on insects for reproduction.

When I hike through the 4700-acre Torrance Barrens (my local ‘sacred place’ on Lake Muskoka) in early spring, it’s always a joy to see the red maples, their red flowers contrasting with the rugged, grey gneiss outcrops.

And at our own cottage property in Muskoka, I only have to look out the window to see one of our own wild red maples coming into bloom alongside its faithful companion, the white pine (Pinus strobus).

Red maple leaves are green in summer as they absorb sunlight to synthesize the sugars the trees need to survive.  The species is well-known for being intolerant of alkaline soils, and leaves often appear “chlorotic” or yellowish in those conditions. The particular array of the leaves in the canopy is often reflected in its autumn colour, with more exposed parts of individual leaves turning red, while shaded portions turn yellow. 

The winged fruit or seed key of all maples is called a ‘samara’.

The red maple below in Section J in Mount Pleasant Cemetery is one of my favourite trees in autumn.  You can see some of that mixed fall colouration here….

…. and also below in my arrangement of leaves I picked up below another tree. Notice how different these leaves are from the green ones above and others later in this blog. Red maple is known for having a wide diversity of leaf shapes.

The tree has been a sentimental favourite of writers and naturalists. In his journal, Henry Thoreau wrote this on September 25, 1857:  “The red maple has fairly begun to blush in some places by the river. I see one, by the canal behind Barrett’s mill, all aglow against the sun. These first trees that change are most interesting, since they are seen against others still freshly green — such brilliant red on green. I go half a mile out of my way to examine such a red banner.”

But some red maple cultivars have been selected specifically for their biochemistry in producing a reliable show of red fall colour, like the tree below (possibly Red Sunset) which has carpeted the ground in the cemetery after an overnight freeze.

Contrast that uniform colour with the leaves of the straight species, below.

In fact, there are so many mature red maples in the cemetery that I have photographed specimens featuring all-gold, all-yellow and all-red fall leaves, below. Note the serrated margins of the leaves – an easy way to tell red maple from sugar maple, which has smooth margins.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two large red maples in autumn.

At our own cottage on Lake Muskoka, I photographed young red maples at the shore exhibiting this same colour difference.  Things like this are interesting to me because there is a general theory that (red) anthocyanin secondary pigments act as autumn sunscreens for certain tree species, allowing them to continue to photosynthesize well into the fall after green chlorophyll breaks down.  Despite my efforts, I have not been able to ascertain why there is such startlingly different pigment biochemistry in this species, particularly when grown on the same plot of land where pH is not therefore a factor. My own theory, backed up by a few speculative references, is that it has to do with sex of the tree: red leaves on males, yellow leaves on females. (Oh, by the way, voracious local beavers cut down these scrubby little red maples.  Beavers don’t care about biochemistry, only housing.)

Speaking of the cottage, this is our best red maple in autumn, as seen from indoors. (And that’s my homemade botanical lampshade.)

It doesn’t surprise me that Acer rubrum is considered to be the ‘most abundant and widespread deciduous tree species’ in eastern North America.  If you hike in our local Muskoka, Ontario woods in May, the little seedlings appear everywhere, including with spring ephemeral wildflowers such as trout lily or dogs-tooth violet (Erythronium americanum), below.  This photo is also a good illustration of the “opposite branching” habit of all maples.

Here it is amidst wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) and other native plants.

In the same forest, on the same day, we find a sugar maple (Acer saccharum) seedling.  Note the smooth margins and the opposite branching.

Sugar maple’s flowers are unlike those of red maple; they are ‘perfect’, meaning male and female flowers are on the same tree. Here you see mostly male flowers with their dangling anthers, but also a few female flowers with the curved stigmas.  Sugar maple also flowers later than red maple.

In autumn, sugar maple trees colour early, often with salmon-scarlet leaves covering an entire tree but sometimes with many hues at once, as you see below in my photo from Mount Pleasant Cemetery. 

Between them, red maple and sugar maple produce the most vibrant autumn colours in northeastern forests. One year, a relative with a small plane took me up above the forests of Muskoka. Looking down, this is what I saw:  a spectacular combination of red maple and sugar maple, with birches and aspens offering yellow contrasts. Oaks would change colour later.

In the ravine in the park at the end of our street in Toronto, the population of native sugar maples, in fall colour below, struggles to survive against the incursion of exotic, invasive Norway maple (Acer platanoides), at right. That European maple takes on yellow fall colour later, along with its normal coal tar spot disease which is visible on some of the leaves.

On the boulevard in front of the pollinator garden at our house in Toronto, we have a columnar tree that I ordered as “red maple” with its presumably spectacular fall colour, to go along with the ginkgo at right. Imagine my disappointment when those red leaves turned out to be dishwater yellow.  Across the street is a Freeman maple – more on that one below.

The ginkgo and red maple on my boulevard were replacements for the 100-year-old silver maple (Acer saccharinum) tree that had dominated our view and given us shade for all the years we’d lived in our home… until 2007. That’s when the city’s water department came through the neighbourhood upgrading the plumbing. I looked down from my 2nd story windows at the workers having their lunch one day.

After they went home, I looked at the excavation on the boulevard. How could any tree survive the kind of root cutting that this would involve?

Sadly, it did not survive (though silver maples are considered short-lived compared to other native trees.) In 2011, it received the dreaded orange dot that designated it for removal.  But note the weeping area in the bark; this is called ‘bacterial wetwood’ and is caused by bacterial infection of a wound.  It happens to many trees and does not bode well for them.

Silver maple trees usually bear male and female flowers separately, but can also have ‘perfect’ flowers containing both male and female organs, like the one below where you can clearly see the male anthers and female stigmas.

Healthy silver maples (they can be notoriously weak-wooded) reach a considerable size at maturity, up to 90 feet (27 m) or more. Native to a wide swath of the Northeast and Central Plains from New Brunswick and Maine to Minnesota and eastern Oklahoma and Texas, they are generally bottomland trees, preferring moist soil.  They derive their common name from the silvery underside of the leaves. In autumn, the foliage turns pale yellow. 

Compared to red maple, silver maple leaves are narrow and very deeply notched.

There is an attractive, naturally-occurring hybrid of red and silver maples called Freeman maple (Acer x freemanii). Named in 1969 for Oliver Myles Freeman (1891-1979) of the U.S. National Arboretum……

…… who made the first controlled cross of the species in 1933, using red maple as the female parent, it blends the best traits of both species: the form and rich fall colour of red maple with the fast growth and cultural adaptability of silver maple.

Growing 40-60 feet (12-18 m) tall with a 20-40 feet (6-12 m) spread, it has become a popular street tree in Toronto.  There are also many specimens at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, below.

When I created my “leaf dancers” blog in November 2020 (see Pigments of my Imagination), I gathered small Freeman maple leaves from the boulevard tree across the street to fashion the skirts of my Maple Maypole dancers.  I like to think Oliver Freeman would be amused to see them.

Finally, a little maple that grows in the shady understory of northeastern forests, including the mixed woods near our cottage on Lake Muskoka:  striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum).  It’s also called “moose maple” because it is sometimes the winter food of moose and white-tailed deer; squirrels and chipmunks forage on its twigs; and many birds consume the seeds. Though occasionally seen as a small, single-trunked tree, it is usually found in nature as a multi-stemmed shrub, seldom exceeding 20 feet (6 m).  Taxonomically, it is the only non-Asian species in the Acer section Macrantha, or “snakebark maples”; all the other 18-21 species, e.g. A. davidii, A. rufinerve, A. tomentosum, occur in China, eastern Russia, Korea, Japan or Myanmar.  The photo below shows its dainty samaras.

Its leaves have three shallow lobes and the greenish flowers are held in arching racemes.  If you look very closely, you can see an early instar of gypsy moth or LDD moth (Lymantria dispar dispar) on the lower right of the leaf. In May, I still thought we’d survive the onslaught of this destructive pest; by mid-summer, it was clear we had not, as you can read in my 2021 blog.

Though there are other maple trees in North America, including mountain maple (A. spicatum), Manitoba maple (A. negundo) and black maple (A. nigrum) in the east and central Canada and bigleaf maple (A. macrophyllum), Douglas maple (A. glabrum subsp. douglasii) and vine maple (A. circinatum) in the west, I’ve included in this stroll the beautiful trees I see each year here in Ontario.  Oh, there’s one more maple we see fairly often – and it’s native right across the country.  My little granddaughter once confused it with the phrase “make believe”, but it is our true (if slightly stylized) “maple leaf forever”.

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Want to read about more North American trees?  See my recent blogs on tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and redbuds (Cercis canadensis and its cousins). And here is one on fall colour in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

Radiant Redbuds

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In my second blog looking at trees native to eastern North America, I’m focusing on a crowd favourite: eastern redbud, Cercis canadensis (as well as a few of its overseas cousins). One of my great botanical thrills was driving through North Carolina in early spring 2003 and seeing the spectacular combination of flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) with redbud in the woods along the highway. This photo from my slide film days shows these two native partners at their flowering peak.

I wish I could say that eastern redbud is native to Ontario, but that is not the case unless you count a reported single sighting in 1892 by botanist John Macoun of a tree on the south shore of Pelee Island (which is itself the most southerly piece of land in Canada). Nevertheless, redbuds grow very well in gardens in southern Ontario, particularly if they’re sourced in Michigan where their hardiness is more assured than those from more southern climes. They reach about 30 ft (9 m) in height and spread. That considerable width, especially, means they’re not always the best choice for a very small garden, though they can be pruned to maintain the desired shape. I love the redbuds that grow at Toronto Botanical Garden, below.  

Redbud is from the legume family, Fabaceae, so its magenta-pink flowers resemble its familiar cousins like sweet pea, lupine and runner bean. In a good year, the clusters literally cloak the branches.  Like many other legumes, the flowers are ‘papilionaceous’, from the Latin papilion for butterfly and describing the shape of the corolla. They are also ‘cauliferous’, meaning they emerge directly from the branches before the leaves are produced.  But unlike many other legumes which bear compound leaves, redbud leaves are simple and heart-shaped.

Redbud flowers are edible, rich in Vitamin C and especially good in salads. According to Mother Earth News, they “have a delicious flavor that is like a green bean with a lemony aftertaste”. They are also excellent sources of nectar and pollen for early bees, and used by native bees like this cellophane bee (Colletes inaequalis) in Toronto…..

…. and also honey bees (Apis mellifera), provided temperatures are warm enough for them to fly. This one was near the hives at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

There is a white-flowered form (C. canadensis f. alba) which looks especially beautiful when planted amidst pink-flowered redbuds.

It is also popular with bees, like this bumble bee queen.

At the Toronto Botanical Garden, there is a lovely raised copse of assorted redbuds underplanted with spring bulbs.

Cascading over the stone wall in the photo above is C. canadensis ‘Covey’ or Lavender Twist™, a small, weeping eastern redbud found in Cornelia Covey’s garden in Westfield, NY in the 1960s and propagated and patented by Tim Brotzman. It is perfectly placed in this garden, below.

There are several good cultivars of eastern redbud, if your taste runs to coloured foliage. ‘Forest Pansy’ is one of the oldest. Found originally in 1947 at Forest Nursery in McMinnville, Tennessee, it was patented in 1965.  In spring and early summer it is a rich, wine-red, but I love standing under it later in the season when it has lost some of its red anthocyanins pigments and takes on this mottled look.

‘Ruby Falls’, below, is a cross between ‘Covey’ and ‘Forest Pansy’. It’s a small tree, 6 ft (2 m) tall and 4 ft (1.3 m) wide.

I photographed luminous C. canadensis ‘Hearts of Gold’ at wonderful Chanticleer Garden near Philadelphia, my very favourite garden in the U.S. (If you haven’t been to Chanticleer, have a read of my 2-part blog starting here.)  ‘Hearts of Gold’ with its large, chartreuse-yellow leaves was discovered in spring 2002 in Greensboro, N. Carolina by Jon Roethling (now director of Reynolda Gardens in Winston-Salem).   

When I was visiting the United States Botanic Garden in Washington DC in June 2017, I was entranced by the beautiful foliage of Cercis canadensis ‘JN2’ or Rising Sun™, below. Long past flowering, I was treated to the sight of apricot-orange emerging leaves, changing to yellow, then chartreuse, then dark green.  With a 12-ft (3.6m) height and 8-ft (2.4m)  spread, this redbud was found in 2006 and introduced by Ray and Cindy Jackson of Jackson Nursery in Belvedere, TN.

The abundant fruit pods of redbuds are called ‘siliques’, from the Latin word siliqua, meaning a pod or husk. It is defined as a long dry, fruit (seed capsule) with its length measuring more than twice the width, consisting of two fused carpels that separate when ripe.  I found the eastern redbud, below, loaded with seedpods in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery one August.

This is that same tree in the cemetery in autumn, showing off its bright yellow fall colour.

There are two other varieties of North American redbud:  Texas redbud, C. canadensis var. texensis and Mexican redbud, C. canadensis var. mexicana.  I found the latter with its frilly, circular leaves and deep-pink ‘siliques’ at the University of California Berkeley Botanical Garden.

The native European redbud is Cercis siliquastrum from the Mediterranean, its Latin specific epithet chosen by Linnaeus to denote those siliqua.  When I was on my wonderful botanical tour of Greece in autumn 2019, I found redbuds putting out a second flowering in Thermopylae, scene of the historic 480 BC battle between the Persians and Spartans.    

And I found it flowering in the pouring rain in the countryside in Attica.

On a long-ago trip to Paris, there it was in the garden of the Tuileries, below.

Back to North America, I was visiting the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden in March 2014 and was delighted to capture an Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna) nectaring in the flowers of the western redbud (Cercis occidentalis).  This is usually a multi-stemmed shrub and about half the size of eastern redbud and the leaves are more round.

Honey bees were enjoying the western redbud flowers as well.

I found Chinese redbud (Cercis chinensis), below, at RHS Wisley in England way back in 1992. Although it is listed as much taller (49 ft or 15m) than eastern redbud, it evidently usually grows in the wild as a multi-stemmed shrub.

While visiting Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver in May 2014, I found C. chinensis ‘Avondale’ in flower in their Asian collection.  A fairly small tree introduced by Duncan and Davies Nursery in Avondale, New Zealand, it grows about 10 ft (3m) tall x 6 ft (2m) wide.

On May 4, 2019, I photographed a dense, multi-stemmed shrub labelled Cercis gigantea at the late plantswoman Francisca Darts’s garden, Darts Hill Garden Park in Surrey, B.C. (below).  In ‘Trees and Shrubs Online’, authors Ross Bayton and John Grimshaw write: “This species is enigmatic. There is no record of the publication of the name in either the International Plant Names Index (www.ipni.org) or the International Legume Database & Information Service (www.ildis.org), and it is not described in the (currently draft) Flora of China treatment, and yet it appears in the catalogues of several nurseries and botanic gardens…. The limited information available via the internet suggests that C. gigantea is similar to C. chinensis but has much larger leaves and a more vigorous growth rate. Plants originating from seed collected as C. chinensis during the 1980 Sino-American Botanical Expedition ( western Hubei) were later identified as C. gigantea by Dr Ted Dudley at the US National Arboretum…. supporting this supposition of similarity between the two taxa.”

I will leave you with my photo of eastern redbud in the Japanese Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens from April 28, 2018, and the words of naturalist Donald Culross Peattie — always the romantic — from his ‘A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America’.  “When the redbud flowers, the still leafless deciduous woods display its charms down every vista; it shines in the somber little groves of Scrub Pine; it troops up the foothills of the Appalachians; it steps delicately down towards swampy ground in the coastal plain, flaunts its charms beside the red clay wood roads and along the old rail fences of the piedmont. Inconspicuous in summer and winter, Redbud shows us in spring how common it is.”    

Tuliptree – A Beautiful Forest Giant

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Today, the weather is frosty with a few more inches of snow to add to the melting pile in my garden.  Thus, it is the perfect time to think about June, when the robins and cardinals are singing high above and the tulip tree’s flowers are morphing from chlorophyll-rich green to yellow, with bees foraging in the blossoms. Bees like the big carpenter bee here (Xylocopa virginica).

I filmed that carpenter bee foraging in the flowers on June 9, 2017.  Listen to that joyous avian chorus!

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All kinds of bees enjoy the nectar-rich flowers of tuliptree…. or do you prefer “tulip poplar”?  Since it’s neither a tulip nor a poplar, let’s go with the Latin, Liriodendron tulipifera, one of our most beautiful and stately native North American trees. This is Augochlora pura, the pure-green sweat bee.

When Linnaeus gave this North American native tree its Latin binomial name in his 1753 Species Plantarum, he combined two Greek words for the genus: leiriŏn, meaning “lily”, and dӗndron, meaning “tree”.  Then he added the specific epithet tulipifera, meaning “tulip-bearing” or “tulip-like”. So, a “lily tree” with “tulip-like” flowers – the poor thing, such a derivative identity!  In fact, it is classed as Magnoliaceae where its height and size have earned its title as “the king of the Magnolia family”.  You can see those magnolia traits in this close-up showing the spiral arrangement of the stamens and pistils on a conical receptacle. Unlike more recently-evolved angiosperms with distinctive sepals and petals, tuliptree flowers have whorled parts called tepals.  

It is the tallest tree of the eastern forests of North America, with one specimen in a secret location in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina believed to hold the record at 190 feet (58 m). Though I haven’t seen the tree in the wild, its native range does extend into the Carolinian forests on the north shore of Lake Erie and southwest shore of Lake Huron in Ontario.  But I did focus my lens high up into the flowering canopy of the 160-year old specimen at Princeton University, below, the tallest tree on campus at 135 feet (41 m) with a 16-foot (4.8 m) trunk circumference.  As is typical for mature specimens, this tree had lost its lower branches.

When I was at New York Botanical Garden in spring 2012, I loved walking through the tuliptree allée there under the beautiful canopy of the trees planted more than a century ago according to the design of architect Calvert Vaux, who also worked on the landscape plan for Central Park with Frederick Law Olmsted.

In Toronto, the best specimens of tuliptree are in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, with some young enough to offer their flowering branches at a low enough level for me to observe them. A beautiful tree near the gates at Yonge Street features variegated leaves; in commerce this tree is called ‘Majestic Beauty’.

Research has shown that Liriodendron tulipifera it is one of the most nectar-rich species of trees, by a factor of hundreds of times more nectar volume than other species. The nectary area on the internal surface of the tepals, a special epidermis tissue called “nectarostomata”, is emblazoned with yellow and orange markings to attract pollinators.  Colourful floral markings like this, aka “nectar guides”, are an evolutionary adaptation to act as a signal to insects and improve the chances of pollination. Scientists have shown that after a few days of secretion, so much protein-rich nectar is produced that it flows down into the base of the flower.  Tuliptree is also a food plant for the caterpillars of the eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly (Papilio glaucus).

Some years ago I wrote a story on urban beekeeping for Organic Gardening magazine, which has since been shut down. One of the beekeepers I interviewed, Linda Tillmann, seen in the story spread below, lives in Atlanta where the tree is a common forest species. As she told me: “In Atlanta bee season is limited by the tulip poplar bloom.  Generally by the beginning of June our nectar flow is over, though bees also take nectar from holly, blackberry and others.”

Photos of Linda Tillmann and her bees by Gregory Miller, Atlanta

As the inflorescence ages and the central, spindle-shaped pistil elongates, the similarity to magnolias becomes even more obvious.

The leaves of tuliptree are unusually shaped – indeed, a little like the flowers of a stout tulip. Typically, they have four lobes, occasionally six.  Lustrous and little bothered by insect predation or disease, they were praised by one of my favourite naturalists, Donald Culross Peattie in his book A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America. He wrote that there was something joyous :“in the fresh green of its leaves, which, being more or less pendulous on long slender stalks, are forever turning and rustling in the slightest breeze; this gives the tree an air of liveliness lightening its grandeur.”

In autumn, depending on conditions in the summer, tuliptree leaves turn gold, apricot or bronze….

…..and sometimes a mix of hues.

In early winter, you might see the aggregate winged fruits as they fall away from the central stalk.  The seeds are eaten by birds and small animals.  I will give my last words to Donald Peattie. “Even in winter the tree is still not unadorned, for the axis of the cone remains, candelabrum fashion, erect on the bare twig when all the seeds have fallen. No wonder that in the gardens of France and England this is one of the most popular of all American species.”