Gardening

Yulan

Denis Wood

The yulan is very old: 1,00 years at least in China before it was brought to Europe in the last decade of the eighteenth century, when it must have been seen with incredulous wonder, its large, sixinch white upright chalice flowers, with the scent of eternity on them, on bare branches, were unlike anything imagined in dreams. It is Magnolia denudata, a tree of forty feet when fully grown and usually spreading wider. The flowers come out in Marclrand April, and being so early can be exposed to damage from frost, although the tree itself is hardy enough. It is still one of the most beautiful of trees, compelling by its strangeness, remote, cold in our alien temperate landscape. Its mandarin presence needs a place a little apart from a house, against the background of a wood still leafless and dark from winter, and looking towards the west from where the level evening light will touch its pure white flowers.

One of its descendants, M. soulangiana, by contrast much more human and romantic, is for planting at the corner of a terrace where someone indoors would play Chopin on spring evenings. It is the result of a cross between the yulan and M. Wit*lora, an undistinguished plant with -dark purple flowers. It is this purple which informs the seven-inch flowers of M. soulangianu with varying degrees of mauve-purple staining towards the base. The cross was first made

by the Chevalier Soulange-Bodin at Fromont near Paris in 1820. Its size and habit of growth are similar to those of the yulan, but the flowers appear rather later. in

April, and are less liable to frost damage. Both the yulan and M. soulangiana produce their flowers at an early age — in the first years after planting: this is less frus trating than having to wait for twenty years for M. campbelli 10 come into flower, but it has a disadvantage for a fastidious 019'

server because although the tree may be small, perhaps only four feet high the flowers are almost, if not quite, full size, and out of scale with the tree. It is only when the tree reaches to ten feet that it is seen in its true character when in flower. The yulan is also a parent ol

another exceedingly beautiful magnolia, Witchi, the other partner in the union being M. campbelli: the cross was made bY P. C. M. Veitch in 1907. It is an aristocr4 like both its parents, growing to forty feet, and while it has some of the upright habit of M. campbelli, begins to branch rather lower down. The flowers

are intermediate in size, between those of its parents, pale rose on a

cream ground like waxed parch ment. These flowers are produced while the tree is still young, but it

is quick growing and soon becomes a large tree, therefore it should be given good space

around it at planting. According t() W. J. Bean, in his Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles' it is quite hardy and it seems that it should be much more widely' planted than the obliging and ubiquitous soulangiana. M. campbelli itself came to

Europe from the Himalayas in 1868. Here it grows to about sixty feet and does not flower until it

approaches maturity, sometimes as long as twenty years after

planting. In woodland, which is the best place for it, it tends to go

straight up like a telegraph pole SO that all its flowers are at the top almost out of sight from ground level; and Much better seen from above. This is excellently contrived at Caerhays, where the trees are planted on the side of 3 hill in thin woodland with grass

paths winding upwards, making it possible to get above the tree and to look down on the astonishing spectacle of hundreds of thiose rose-red scented flowers, ten

inches across, on bare branches in February. Although it grows,ouite well out of doors at Kew, its very early flowers are at great risk fronl frost, and it is really a plant for the milder counties of S.W. England, Scotland and Ireland.