Botany of the Carolinas Coastal Plain, Part 50: A Tree Where It Was Meant to Be | Edisto Beach State Park, South Carolina, USA
Taken along the park’s Spanish Mount Trail.
Here’s a Sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) that really caught my eye on my hike through the Edisto Beach marine forest.
To quote the Flora of North America, “The most widely distributed species of Magnolia in the flora, M. virginiana occurs in two growth forms: deciduous and often multitrunked northward, and typically single-trunked and evergreen in the southern range.”
For years before this trip I’d been well-acquainted with the Sweetbay’s northern shrubby type, which I’d often seen in gardens and arboreta. And, as I recall, I planted at least one myself, when I was the horticulturist in NYC’s Jefferson Market Garden. But here it was, a straight-trunked understory tree in its own right, in its favored Coastal Plain habitat. Its spring flowering period had passed, worse luck for me, but at least I could appreciate it in its most authentic setting. Not surprisingly, it was doing what most forest hardwoods do, by gradually thinning out its lower branches in favor of top growth where most of the sunlight is.
From what I understand, the US National Champion Sweetbay Magnolia is 115 ft / 25 m tall; it’s located in Jefferson, Florida. The specimen shown in this image may be considerably shy of that, but it’s an impressive example of its species nonetheless.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Botany of the Carolinas Coastal Plain album.> album.
Botany of the Carolinas Coastal Plain, Part 50: A Tree Where It Was Meant to Be | Edisto Beach State Park, South Carolina, USA
Taken along the park’s Spanish Mount Trail.
Here’s a Sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) that really caught my eye on my hike through the Edisto Beach marine forest.
To quote the Flora of North America, “The most widely distributed species of Magnolia in the flora, M. virginiana occurs in two growth forms: deciduous and often multitrunked northward, and typically single-trunked and evergreen in the southern range.”
For years before this trip I’d been well-acquainted with the Sweetbay’s northern shrubby type, which I’d often seen in gardens and arboreta. And, as I recall, I planted at least one myself, when I was the horticulturist in NYC’s Jefferson Market Garden. But here it was, a straight-trunked understory tree in its own right, in its favored Coastal Plain habitat. Its spring flowering period had passed, worse luck for me, but at least I could appreciate it in its most authentic setting. Not surprisingly, it was doing what most forest hardwoods do, by gradually thinning out its lower branches in favor of top growth where most of the sunlight is.
From what I understand, the US National Champion Sweetbay Magnolia is 115 ft / 25 m tall; it’s located in Jefferson, Florida. The specimen shown in this image may be considerably shy of that, but it’s an impressive example of its species nonetheless.
The other photos and descriptions of this series can be found in my Botany of the Carolinas Coastal Plain album.> album.