Greenwood has several fun and informative garden tour events upcoming in the month of June, involving master gardeners and our friends at Bee City USA.
Wednesday, June 19, 10:00 AM – Noon: Scavenger Hunt for kids to help them learn what food is pollinated by what pollinator at the Uptown Farmers Market Garden (220 Maxwell Avenue). Look for the Bee City USA Booth.
Thursday, June 20, 5:30 PM: Pollinator Garden and Topiary tour by master gardener Ann Barklow. This is part of the ongoing Festival of Flowers program. Meet at the Veterans Plaza Pollinator Garden at 106 Main Street near the gazebo.
Saturday, June 22, 10 AM – 5 PM and Sunday, June 23, 1 PM – 4 PM: Master gardener Ann Barklow’s Wildlife Habitat and Living Classroom on Pollinators (110 Ferry Cove Road in Greenwood) will be one of the gardens featured on the Festival of Flowers Garden Tours (rescheduled from June 8 – 9). This is presented jointly by the Lakelands Master Gardeners and Bee City USA. We will have master gardeners on hand to show you around and answer any questions you may have. SWAT (“Standing Water Action Team”) will also have a booth set up for mosquito education.
Our native Southern Magnolia, symbol of the South and the state flower of Mississippi and Louisiana, is now showing large fragrant white flowers. Its botanical name Magnolia grandiflora refers to its bloom size.
The Magnolia family has over 200 species and is one of our earth’s oldest flowering plant families, with some fossil records dating back 90 or more million years. The flower especially demonstrates this ancient history. Modern flowers have reduced numbers of female parts (pistils), usually just one, whereas more primitive ancestral flowers have several to many. Magnolia flowers apparently developed before bees, and their sturdy female structures are designed for pollination by beetles. Female pistils, curved cream colored, are surrounded by male stamens with red bases, some of which detach and collect into petals.
Southern Magnolia flowers do not produce nectar, but bees are attracted by fragrance and for abundant pollen.
Interesting is that another member of the Magnolia family, Tuliptree Magnolia, also called Tulip Poplar, has smaller greenish-yellow flowers with lots of nectar that is great for honeybees!
Tulip Poplar Tree in Bloom
As Southern Magnolia flowers age, petals and pollen-producing stamens drop, leaving female pistils to develop into fruits. Each cone-like fruit is actually a cluster of many individual one-seeded fruits that developed from the flower’s female pistils. These cones turn shades of pink just before shedding seeds in fall. Seeds are bright red and provide food for birds and small mammals, and are considered non-toxic for pets. Cone-like fruits finally turn brown and drop to the ground.
In winter, evergreen Southern Magnolias are even more easily spotted along roads and in yards, when other trees have lost their leaves. Majestic Magnolias are most beautiful when allowed to keep lower limbs that reach down to the ground. An example is the one growing in Due West at the home of Bill and Emilie Lesesne that is beautifully dressed in a full-length skirt!
The Lesesnes’ Magnolia
Sadly, Magnolias often get “limbed up”, stripping them of their natural glorious green “skirts”!
Horticulture has developed several Magnolia cultivars including the following:
“Bracken’s Brown Beauty”, developed by Ray Bracken of Easley, South Carolina. It is a smaller and more compact tree that can withstand colder climates.
“Little Gem”, considered a “dwarf” cultivar, with a column shape, and growing to about 14 feet blooming with many cup-shaped flowers.
As of June 2019, we have transitioned from the old newsletter format to our new Lakelands Master Gardeners blog! This allows articles to be published in a more timely fashion and eliminates the need for our writers to worry about missing deadlines. Historical newsletters will remain available, but from now on new articles that would previously have been published in the newsletter will appear under “LMG Blog” in the navigation menu.
If you are a Lakelands Master Gardeners member and would like to submit an article for publication, please contact Chris Hackmeyer or use the “Contact Us” link in the navigation menu to request instructions.
