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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: magnolias

La vie en magnolia

08 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by sallynex in France

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bordeaux, France, house hunting, magnolias, Medoc, wine

france1

Sadly, this one right on the banks of the Gironde wasn’t for sale – but the architecture (and garden) were very typical of the area

Just back from a little sojourn in France, where I was helping my mum look for a little pied á terre – nothing too fancy, just somewhere we can all go and have a nice time without having to break the bank.

france2

A little out of our budget…

We were looking in the Médoc area, just to the north-west of Bordeaux on either side of the Gironde (the confluence of the Dordogne and the Garonne – its estuary hits the Atlantic just below the Charentes Maritimes. You can see it on even quite big maps of France as a kind of cut-out triangle a little over halfway down on the left hand side).

france3

…but the views across the river from the front door were amazing

House hunting is exciting at the best of times, but even better when done in a foreign country. Especially one where they have grands crus wines of international repute and restaurants that cook food so sublime you remember the meals for years after. It is not as reliably thus everywhere in France as it once was: which is why it was so lovely to find a little corner that was still untainted (mostly) by the worst bits of modern life.

france4

A typical town house, right against the old city walls in Bourg

They’re keen gardeners in these parts, too. Garden centres a go-go (unusual for France, where they tend to be a bit sparse and mostly confined to a corner of the monster DIY sheds), and lots of beautifully tended gardens too. The magnolias were out everywhere: they can grow olives outdoors here, though not to such spectacularly gnarly effect as further South, and they clearly do get frosts as the bananas and palms were carefully wrapped in several layers of fleece. But you can obviously be a little more daring than you can in the UK.

france5

Even the wine store was tucked into a hole in the ancient stonework

The local housing style is very charming, though a bit tricky for the combination of three-bed house and small-but-useable garden we were after. Lots of old sandstone maisons à deux étages in the towns, but with barely any outdoor space; and out in the country there were maisons médocains, on the face of it a bungalow, but that is to do them a disservice. These little single-storey dwellings sit on their own small plots and are made of the same sandstone as the larger houses, under a little ruffle of old clay tiles.

I think it may be one of these we end up with, much to our surprise as we’d never really considered a single-storey. But a town house with no garden is out of the question: you can’t have a house in the heart of the Médoc without somewhere to sit outside on sunny days and sip the wine.

Most of the really up-together houses are way out of our budget, so I’m thinking we may have some serious DIY ahead of us… but then I can’t help feeling we’d be letting the British side down a bit if we didn’t go for something à rénover. After all, we have a reputation to maintain: the Brits are famous in France for buying the kind of ruins any sensible Frenchman (or woman) wouldn’t touch with a bargepole and then breaking their backs and bank accounts doing them up again.

france6

Very typical single-storey Medoc style house, with a charm all its own

It was a wonderful four or five days in which we got to explore a whole new bit of France. We’ve hit on the exact area – around the town of Macau on the west bank of the Gironde – and now Mum just has to pick a house when she goes back (without me, sadly) in a few weeks’ time. Watch this space!

Magnolia misery

30 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

frost damage, magnolias, sentimentality

How sentimental do you get about your plants?

I know I’m utterly hopeless about mine. It is one of the reasons why my garden has never made the metamorphosis into Proper Garden: attempts at designing it have always been waylaid by a hopeless incontinence where plants are concerned, compelling me to reject the beautifully-designed composition of three or four carefully-chosen varieties in favour of the current hodgepodge of one plant here, one plant there and another one I couldn’t resist shoehorned in between. I really should know better.

And I also get terribly attached to individual plants. Take my magnolia, for example. I got it while I was still in my last house in south-west London, as one of those freebie offers you get from magazines: not knowing any better at the time, I thought to myself, “Ah! 50p for a magnolia! that’s good value!” and sent off for it.

The resulting 6″ high twig needed mollycoddling to an absurd degree: I kept it in a pot for the first five years as it was so small I daren’t risk losing it in my rumbustious borders. I finally dared to plant it out when we first moved here, by which time it was a more confidence-inspiring three feet tall or so, popping it into a corner of my front garden just outside my living room window. So that dates it: a tad short of 9 years ago, and the plant itself is about 14 years old.

Not long afterwards, it put out its first tentative flower, and I discovered for the first time that the rather unduly optimistic label it came with, which declared it a Magnolia liliiflora ‘Susan’ with rich burgundy-red flowers, it was in fact a Magnolia stellata with spidery white flowers. This came as some surprise, but rather a pleasant one.

It has been improving its display every year since: plants seem so grateful to you when you rescue them from an uncertain beginning and nurse them back to the point where they can do what they were born to do. Last year my little twig hit the majestic height of about 6ft and in April and May was a riotous fireworks display of flowers that took my breath away every time I looked at it.

But oh, dear: just look at it this year. My poor lovely magnolia.

It did manage a handful of spidery flowers, but they were tinged with brown and quickly died off. This was my only – and most heart-breaking – frost casualty this year.

I couldn’t bring myself to write her off so left the apparently dead remains in the border. Then I was rootling around doing the weeding about a month ago and realised all is not lost.

It looks a little peculiar: but there is definitely growth coming from the base.


One really odd large branch in rude health…


…and a great many smaller shoots firing up from the lower trunk. She’s survived over a decade to get to this point and she ain’t giving up yet.

Now my only dilemma is what to do. The obvious is to prune out the top growth and shorten that long branch so it’s all in proportion again: I suspect she’ll end up rather multistemmed, but that may be an advantage.

But more to the point, bearing in mind my imminent departure, do you think she’ll survive being moved? I had thought I would have to cut her down, so the new owners wouldn’t get the joy of all those flowers anyway: now that she’s recovered, I’m feeling the urge to continue our long and rather lovely relationship.

On the other hand, of course, I’m going to have chalky soil where I’m going. Though M. stellata is one of the magnolias which is said not to mind a little alkaline, this is a lot alkaline. So I may be putting her through the mill again and it may be better to do the altruistic thing and prune her to shape and leave her for our successors to enjoy.

If I could only be less maudlin about my plants I wouldn’t have this problem. But then on the other hand I probably wouldn’t be gardening either. There’s no hope, really, is there?

The Friday photo

20 Friday Nov 2009

Posted by sallynex in seeds

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Friday photo, magnolias

Magnolia x soulangeana seed pod

Magnolias at Kew

16 Friday May 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

frost, frost damage, Kew, magnolias, trees

Yes, I know it’s long past magnolia season but I thought I’d just recall for everyone just how lovely these trees are. My excuse is that I’ve been having a bit of a magnolia fest this year, as not only did I get to write a whole article about them which included talking to some of the country’s best growers and enthusiasts but also got to see the National Collection down in Caerhays which got me totally smitten – especially this fine specimen.

Well, just a few days after I got back from Cornwall I was over at Kew on another journalistic jaunt (I do love my job) and while wandering back from doing my interview, went to have a look at the magnolias. They’d been rather clobbered by frost, unfortunately – occupational hazard if you’re a magnolia – but there was still enough there to make me swoon.


This one was amazing (and this pic is now my desktop – VP take note, I’ve shown you mine now too!). This is M. ‘Phelan Bright’, and these flowers are 10″ across. Pretty amazing anyway, but even more so when you consider the tree is only 3 years old (some magnolias can take up to 20 years to flower).


Sadly this lovely thing was just about the only flower on the whole tree not reduced to brown and tattered ribbons by frost. Made it all the more special that this one survived. This is M. heptapita ‘Yulan’ – I’d never heard of the species, but the flower colour was the purest white of the lot.


Magnolias aren’t often praised for anything except their flowers, but the buds are just gorgeous (fuzzy brown nutkins you can’t help but stroke) and the leaves are often spectacular too. None more so than the leaves of M. grandiflora – it’s evergreen and as you can see has lush, almost tropical foliage.


I love magnolias for their branch structure and their habit of flowering before the leaves come out – yes, it exposes them to frost, but it also shows you how spectacular pure white flowers against the stark outline of a tree trunk can be. This one is M. x veitchii ‘Alba’.

Note to self: plant another magnolia. I only have M. stellata but every time it comes out in my front garden it looks more spectacular and I promise myself I’ll get another one soon.

Close encounters of the horticultural kind

21 Monday Apr 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Caerhays, close encounters, Cornwall, garden visits, magnolias, memorable plants, Michelia doltsopa, trees

Just sometimes you meet a truly, truly memorable plant. The kind of plant you just know you’ll think about for the rest of your life, in an “oh yeah… now that was amazing” sort of way.

This happened to me last week, while on holiday in Cornwall (of which much more later). The plant in question was a Michelia doltsopa in Caerhays – a fabulous garden, with a National Collection of magnolias and their close relatives, which include the Michelia family.

Now, I discovered while doing a bit of research for a recent article that this not-very-commonly-grown tree is causing some excitement in magnolia-growing circles (not very mainstream, admittedly) – since one of its close relatives (M. yunnanensis) in the process of being recategorised as a magnolia. Well – all I can say is, you might think magnolias are spectacular – but cop a load of this.

(my eight-year-old doesn’t much like having her photo taken)… and every single one of those millions of flowers looked something like this:

You could walk right inside the tree, and in the centre, too, this was a magical, architectural, unforgettable plant:


And as if all that wasn’t enough, the whole thing was scented – a rich, musky, sultry scent that went right to your head. Magnolia fans – eat your hearts out.

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