Edith Bogue Southern Magnolia

Magnolia grandiflora ‘Edith Bogue’

This week’s tree of the week is a large specimen of Southern magnolia residing on John Street just off of Bellevue Avenue.  Its large white flowers that can be up to 12 inches wide when fully open emit a strong lemon scent that brings pollinators in from far and wide, it is often difficult to get a flower shot without having to shake off all the bugs.  Southern magnolias are native to the southeastern US along with Sweetbay magnolia, M. virginiana.  Southern magnolia is a broadleaf evergreen tree that maintains its yearly crop of leaves though the winter and doesn’t shed them until new growth emerges in late spring.  It does not produce a big one time show with all of its flowers open at once that only lasts a couple weeks like its spring blooming cousins do.  Southern magnolia sporadically opens a few flowers at a time but it is in bloom starting the last week of June throughout July into the first week of August.

There are two varieties of this southern tree that I see doing well in our northern climate here in RI; ‘Edith Bogue’ and ‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty’.  This particular tree on John Street is Edith Bogue, named after a woman who purchased a seedling from a Florida nursery and successfully grew it in her garden in New Jersey.  Her tree was named and all subsequent trees of that variety were propagated from cuttings originating from that one tree.  Edith becomes a large open tree with bright green large rounded shiny leaves with very little indumentum (very fine fuzz) below.  The Bracken’s Brown Beauty variety is a showier more compact tree that has smaller pointed leaves that have a wavy leaf margin and are packed with lots of brown indumentum below giving the tree an attractive cocoa brown appearance mixed with the shiny green appearance of the leaves upper surface.