MAGNOLIA A STAR IN TOUGH TIMES

By Richard Wright - Thursday, March 20, 2008

Magnolia stellata, with its star-like petals.

GARDENING DIARY
MAGNOLIAS have an inner steel. They look the most fragile of spring flowers, a beautiful herald of better times ahead, but most are surprisingly robust.
Their mettle was really tested by the recent gales.
Luckily for them, and us too, they had only just come into bloom and were at their most robust when the winds struck.
Magnolias are unusual in that their flowers appear before their leaves.
One of the strongest is stellata, which has a compact, bushy habit, making it ideal for smaller spaces.
Stellata produces big flowers, sometimes pure white but otherwise pink flushed. It is so named because of its star-like petals and, like its cousin, magnolia x loebneri, it is happy in alkaline soils. Most prefer a soil tending toward acidic, such as the soulangeana Rustic Rubra, with its purplish red flowers, or Lennei Alba, with its pure white blooms.
Magnolia Susan has big, showy, fragrant goblet-shaped flowers.
Susan, like stellata, is a compact, upright deciduous shrub.
For those with a bigger garden, magnolia cambellii produces the bigger cup-and-saucer shaped flowers. Darjeeling or Charles Raffill are ones to watch.
Magnolias can be used in woodland planting or as stand alone specimens and they are the best of trees because they need nothing more than a late winter light trim to remove branches that spoil the shape.
Although they flower for just a couple of weeks in spring they offer value right through the year, with attractive leaf and form.

A LANDSCAPE FULL OF PASSION
I’M a sucker for a good romance and for people with passion, too.
Down at St Lawrence there is a couple with both and I’m more than happy to tell you about Sean and Yasmin Collins.
Yasmin is justly proud of her husband’s enterprise, hard work and passion for his St Lawrence Landscapes business he set up in 1989 with a beaten-about Land Rover and £50 borrowed from his dad.
Yasmin wanted to surprise Sean, who was 40 yesterday, by opening-up the paper to see his mug staring back at him from his favourite spot in their garden. Yasmin also wanted to show how proud she is of Sean providing for her and their children, seven-year-old Josh and Milly, who is four, and sustaining the jobs for the four people who work for him.
Sean and Yasmin have been together since she was 14 and it may sound trite, but it’s very clear from his wife that he is very much loved.
He takes great pride in his St Lawrence garden, too, and when it’s finished may well open it to the public.
Please tell me if you do…

THE BEST TIME TO POLLARD WITHOUT RISK
THE Ryde Esplanade pollarding caused Kathleen Hayles to contact me querying the right time of year for the radical pruning to be done and asking me to settle a difference of opinion.
Latest advice is that late winter or early spring, before the sap starts to rise, are ideal.
The council got it bang on with the Esplanade work, when the trees have high food reserves because their energy is not yet diverted into leaf production.
Summer pollarding is sometimes acceptable, but not if there is a drought, because you are simply adding stress to an already-stressed tree.
By clearing top growth you are also exposing the trunk to strong sunlight, after possibly years of shade.
That can also be a shock to the system.
Autumn is now considered the worst time. The wood may be dry but the air is moist, the perfect environment for fungi, which can get in through open wounds and spawn decay.

MAGNOLIA A STAR IN TOUGH TIMES

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