The southern magnolias are blooming all over the piedmont. I saw a spike of a flower on Magnolia grandiflora on April 8. A month later, the show is on.
If you haven’t seen a southern magnolia bloom, the show goes like this: The flower spike looks like a long finger. It gradually swells, first into the shape of a candle flame and then into the shape of a pear. The creamy white flowers finally emerge, and they are big, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, the size of a salad plate or a dinner plate.
The flowers give way to burrs — “spherical, cone-like fruiting clusters,” is what the botanists call them — but boys who scoop them off the ground for ammunition in battles with friends call them burrs. Battles involving little boys happen later in the year, when the burrs are hard and filled with red seeds. At this point, the burrs are fuzzy and look like a big rabbit’s foot.
You see flower spikes, flowers and burrs on the same tree now.
There are other species of magnolia, of course, but M. grandiflora is dominant. I saw the buds on M. liliiflora Feb. 7 and full flowers in March. I have not seen any buds on bigleaf magnolia, M. macrophylla.
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