Summer Flower Power—Magnolias

The season's sweet smell

The other evening when I got home from dinner with my father and some other family I clipped a bloom from a magnolia tree in my back yard. The tree is about 30 feet tall and stands next to a red bud tree at the back of my yard, near an alley that runs behind my house.

Its green, leathery leaves are thick and shiny. Leaves that have fallen scatter the dark shredded mulch below the trees. They’re brown and brittle. When I raked some up the other morning before the day got too warm and muggy they cracked and snapped like kettle-cooked potato chips.

Last week I had been eyeing another bloom on the tree but it was too high for me to reach. I considered trying to get it using a small step ladder but vetoed that idea given the squishy instability of the mulch. I don’t need to go toppling any time soon, even if it might be a soft landing.

I hoped that some of the tree’s lower branches would have blooms. I did some reconnaissance one afternoon. Nothing looked promising. But then I noticed this bloom the afternoon of dinner with my family, right at the end of a branch that dipped to about level with my shoulders.

The bloom was easy for me to reach but it was also barely open. It looked more like a sheaf of endive lettuce. I wondered if it would continue to open after I cut it or if cutting it would arrest the process.

I am sure that at some point I had heard advice from my mother or grandmother on clipping flowers before they have completely bloomed. They both had green thumbs and knew how to nurture and get things to grow.

My mother loved ferns and orchids. She filled a small sun room with the plants. She cultivated a giant fern that won a blue ribbon in the state fair three times. My grandmother had a garden of box bush, lantanas, impatiens, and gardenias. She also had several sizable magnolia trees around a small swimming pool. Mine is kind of stumpy and squat compared to hers.

But no advice on clipping came to mind. And I didn’t feel like Googling because I get tired of Googling everything all the time. I was liking my low-tech evening. I also could not speak my mother or grandmother about what to do. My mother died almost five years ago. My grandmother died nearly 30 years ago. I don’t have a Ouija board or know anything about seances to try to contact them through either of those mediums.

I decided to take the chance that the bloom would keep opening and clipped it with a pair of scissors. When I came back inside the house I put the bloom in a shallow bowl filled with some warm water and put it on the kitchen counter. Its fresh, citrusy fragrance faintly scented the room.

By sunrise the next morning the bloom had doubled in size. After a couple more hours it had opened even more into a large, cream-colored globe, and I could smell it everywhere downstairs. You can see what it looked like at this point in the photo at the beginning of this essay. If I could make it a scratch-and-sniff image, I would.

The smell reminds me of being at my grandmother’s pool this time of year. It was a peaceful, settled place although it was not that sunny because of the shade created by the magnolias. If you wanted a tan you’d need to follow a few small spots of light that migrated over the course of the day from the shallow to the deep end of the pool.

Getting tan didn’t interest me so much. I liked to listen—to the cicadas, the birds, the water gurgling into the drains of the gutters, the pool sweep hissing as it made its diligent rounds, the neighbor’s car crunching along their gravel driveway. If it were warm and humid enough, everything could feel slow and heavy and distant, the scent of the magnolias just as saturating as the moisture in the air.

Although I couldn’t remember any advice about whether to cut the budding magnolia bloom from my tree I did remember some other guidance—avoid touching the petals because doing so could turn them brown. I haven’t laid a finger on them, and they remain unblemished.

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