Spring is definitely coming in the NY metro area. This past Sunday I spent a few hours walking around the
Planting Field Arboretum with my daughter. It was a great day, just a bit cool (around 50F), and oddly, a few hours before we would get an inch of snow. We saw many plants blooming, but the one I want to talk about in this post is the Magnolia tree we saw.
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I love the site of flowering trees in the early Spring!
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To be honest, I'm still not 100% certain this is a Magnolia, and I haven't been able to get it to species. The first place I looked was the
Trees of New York: Native and Naturalized by Donald Leopold. But the
Magnolia species described in there didn't quite fit what I was seeing. In particular, the bud on this tree is fairly big and hairy, which didn't match the buds described in this book.
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| Bud, not so focused. And bark of relatively young twig. |
I tried looking through a few of my other books, but eventually went to the internet and started Google searching terms like "fuzzy flower bud early spring" and what not. Ultimately, the images and descriptions I found that best fit my observations were for
Magnolia 'Elizabeth'. This is a cross between
M. acuminata (Cucumber tree) and
M. denudata (Yulan magnolia), so a native and a exotic, respectively. It was neat to read on the Missouri Botanical Garden site that this variety is patented by the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. All things considered, it makes a lot of sense that this tree would be planted at an estate along the north shore of Long Island.
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| My daughter, enjoying the early spring day outside, while dad takes pictures of plants. |
