Magnolia will never go out of fashion

Last week’s news that a mature magnolia tree had been felled in a suburb of Poole, Dorset, because wood decay made it a threat to nearby houses, will have touched the hearts of gardeners everywhere. For, in the words of the plant collector E.H. Wilson, after whom Magnolia wilsonii is named, magnolias are ‘aristocrats of the garden’. This is scarcely hyperbole, since magnolias can trace their lineage back to the Pliocene epoch, and are famous for their noble stature, and beautiful, showy and often highly scented flowers. Although owners of large woodland gardens in Cornwall or Argyll may cavil at the newspaper description of this felled giant as ‘Britain’s tallest magnolia tree’, at 60 feet tall it looks in the photograph (taken last spring) to be a magnificent specimen, with a mass of deep pink flowers on naked stems. No journal of record was prepared to hazard a name, but I think it might have been a Magnolia campbellii, which can grow to that height and has enormous flowers, capable (the newspaper said) of filling five wheelie bins with its fallen petals.