Blooming Magnolia

Alert Gazette readers will recall that I recently posted a photo of what we guessed was the beginning of a flower on one of our magnolia trees…the first bloom since we planted them in April, 2021. As it turns out, we were correct.

Neither of us knew much about magnolia trees; there weren’t that many in West Texas where we spent much of our lives. They’re more common here in Central Texas, and when it came to choosing something to replace the large tree we lost to a brutal winter storm, they seemed like a good evergreen replacement. They’ve grown quite well, but the absence of flowers has tried our* patience a bit. We’re finally seeing a few buds that should eventually turn into blooms…and one that actually did.

Not having a clue as to the expected interval from floral bud to bloom, I set out to document the process of one of those buds. The following slide show will take you from mid-April to mid-May — from promising bud to withering bloom. You can use the arrows to move to each successive date-stamped photo.

Did you notice how slowly the bud matured, and how rapidly the bloom declined? The flower finally opened on May 11, and less than 36 hours later was brown and dying.

The specific trees that we planted are referred to as “D. D. Blanchard Magnolias” (Magnolia grandiflora ‘D.D. Blanchard’), and while we bought ours locally, they came from a nursery in Louisiana. They’re what are known as cultivars, meaning they’ve been bred to achieve certain specific traits that will be passed on to future generations during propagation. According to the first link above, D. D. Blanchards were initially cultivated at a nursery in North Carolina (I didn’t find anything that corroborated that claim, and I did my usual in-depth investigation involving at least two Google searches 😆).

We’ve been able to locate only a couple more buds on the two trees; at least one other was somehow broken off (I suspect mischief from one of our juvenile delinquent squirrels). It’s not exactly a bumper crop (whatever that means**), but watching them is more entertaining than most of what’s on TV nowadays, reruns of Better Off Ted notwithstanding.

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*Our is actually code for Debbie because a blooming magnolia is not at the top of my wish list. But it’s also not at the bottom. I guess it falls somewhere on the spectrum between bacon and kidney stones. [return]

**Well, you’re obviously as curious as me, so here’s a link to the origin of that phrase. We’re all about education here at the Gazette. And bacon. [return]