Magnolias in Are Cultivation

摘要

Magnolias and the people who grow them are a common thread that can be traced throughout my horticultural career. In the late 1960s I saw the flowers of Asiatic tree magnolias, particularly Magnolia campbellii and M. sargentiana, in the Valley Garden,Windsor, for the first time. I then became aware of the magnificence of these garden aristocrats. Prior to this, my knowledge had been restricted to M. x soulangeana and M. stellata; beautiful as they were across suburban Britain, they did not have the'wow' factor of a tree magnolia in full flowering glory. Visits to Cornish gardens at this time brought home the sense of wonder that early 20th-century plant collectors such as Ernest Wilson and Frank Kingdon Ward must have felt when they saw them in the wild.