Any day now it will happen; my Magnolia stellata’s buds, grey and hairy, are going to burst open. I can’t wait, I love my star magnolia. While walking around nurseries and garden centres at this time of year I just can’t get away from the rows of it, covered in blooms, tempting me to make another impulse purchase, just as I did five years ago.
I found my little plant in a “reduced to clear” section, looking extremely battered and bruised. I couldn’t leave it there. It took a while to recover from its ordeal, but I am pleased to say it seems to be flourishing now. For most of the year it is clothed in insignificant bright green foliage but just now, before that foliage has made an appearance, its performance cannot be beaten. Flowers, so delicate, like multitudes of ballet dancers, and a scent so utterly perfect, if you can catch a hint of it on a warm spring day. I couldn’t be without this plant; it’s ideal for a small garden the size of mine. It was an impulse purchase that I haven’t for one minute regretted.
As with many of my favourite plants though it’s not just its beauty that attracts me to it. Its story grabs me too. It’s this story that made me take pity on my plant when I saw it in such a state (and destined for the dump).
M. stellata was first seen by the botanist Carl Peter Thunberg who named it Magnolia tomentosa. It should have kept this original name, but it had subsequently been given the name Buergeria stellata by Siebold and Zuccarini in 1846 more than 80 years later. Eventually botanist Carl Johann Maximowicz placed it back in the genus Magnolia in 1872. It was introduced to British cultivation from Japan in about 1877 by Charles Maries, who collected it on behalf of Veitch Nurseries. As the name ‘stellata’ was in popular use after its introduction to horticulture, and because of the rules of naming plants, the name tomentosa was finally dropped for good. By this point you would think any plant would be having identity issues!
Dr Benjamin Blackburn decided, however, that M. stellata wasn’t significantly different enough from its close relative the Kobushi magnolia (Magnolia kobus) and tried to rename it a variety of this plant; Magnolia kobus var. stellata. It took until 1998, though, for this mess of botanical naming to be sorted out once and for all when David Hunt published his monograph of Magnolias and Their Allies. Finally Magnolia stellata was settled on as the plants name. Well almost ...
The star magnolia, you see, was only believed to come from the mountains just north-east of Nagoya in Japan, but a plant very similar to it - almost indistinguishable in fact - was found in China too. It was believed that these plants had naturalised from cultivated plants, but there was something not quite right. Botanists did battle trying to decide if they were the same species, and it took genetic research to figure out if this small group of about 200 plants was actually different. It turned out it was, and Magnolia sinostellata (stellata from China) was born.
While all of this botanical wrangling was going on, and their fame as garden plants increased, M. stellata and its close relative M. sinostellata’s wild populations have been decreasing. These two popular garden plants are endangered species in the wild. M. stellata has declined through massively increased urban development and M. sinostellata through deforestation and overcollection as a garden plant.
With over 150,000 9cm pots of these plants currently in production in the Netherlands alone, it seems crazy that they are so very threatened in the wild and that money for their conservation is so very short. Is there a way that sales of the star magnolia could help save it as a wild species? I took pity on my own plant, relegated as it was to the bargain bin. I wonder; could we gardeners take pity on M. stellata and help save it from its new existential crisis?
