Magnolia liliiflora Seeds | Lily Magnolia
LATIN NAME: Magnolia liliiflora
COMMON NAME: Lily Magnolia, Mulan Magnolia, Purple Magnolia
Plant Profile
The flowers open before there is any leaf to hide them, standing upright along the bare grey wood like small tulip glasses, rich purple outside and paler within. In a cold spring a single sharp frost can brown the whole display, which is why the shrub is usually given a sheltered place against a wall.
Each flower is wrapped in a pair of soft, hairy bud scales through the winter, and those scales are the reason magnolias can flower so early: the flower is fully formed inside before the cold arrives, so only the scales have to be pushed aside when the mild weather arrives. The leaves follow the flowers on the same shoots, emerging as bronze, silky, rolled scrolls that unroll into large oval blades with a pointed tip.
Botanists have argued for two centuries about how many genera the family contains. A widely used treatment splits the large, early-flowering, bud-scale-carrying species into a separate genus, which would make this plant Yulania liliiflora, while the broader and older treatment keeps every magnolia in one genus. Both names are in current use in horticulture and neither is a mistake.
In 1820 a French plantsman raised a cross at Fromont, near Paris, between the white-flowered Magnolia denudata and this purple species, and the offspring — the saucer magnolia — spread through gardens across Europe and North America within a generation. Most of the large-flowered magnolias sold today descend from that single cross, and the parentage explains their colour range, which runs from white through rose to deep purple.
The species was described from cultivated material, not from a wild station, and the shrub has been grown in gardens in China and Japan for so long that the boundary between native and planted is genuinely unclear. It arrived in European cultivation at the end of the eighteenth century and has been a stock plant for hybridists ever since, valued for its hardiness and its habit of producing a second, lighter flush of bloom in high summer.
Science & Biotechnology
The volatile profile of the genus is built around terpenoids, with linalool and its relatives among the leading notes together with methyl benzoate and a group of sesquiterpenes that give the heavier, spicier background. The oils sit in the tepals rather than in the reproductive centre, and the quantities are small enough that a whole crop of flowers yields only a trace on distillation; the value of the analysis lies in taxonomy, where scent chemistry helps separate closely related species that flower at the same time.
Uses & Benefits
The flower carries nine to twelve tepals in overlapping whorls, the outermost three rather smaller and more greenish than the rest, and the reproductive parts sit in the centre on an elongated receptacle — a spiral of many stamens below and many free carpels above. Because the carpels are separate and arranged along a cone, the fruit that follows is not a berry but an aggregate of small follicles, each one splitting along its own seam when the seed is ripe. Chromosome counts in the family run on a base of nineteen, and the flowers have no true nectar, so beetles feeding on pollen and on the starchy tissue of the receptacle carry out much of the pollination.
Growing from Seed
Ripe magnolia seed hangs out of the split follicle on a fine thread, wrapped in a soft red jacket that is oily and rots readily in a closed bag, so rub it off under running water before storing or sowing. Sow in a deep pot of humus-rich, slightly acid compost, cover lightly, keep it moist and shaded, and expect a scattered emergence over a long window, because the seed of the family is slow and uneven. There is no hard coat to break; freshness is the whole technique, and seed kept cool and just damp from the day the fruit splits gives far more seedlings than the same seed left in a warm room for a season.
Named selections have to be raised vegetatively to come true, and the reliable method for a gardener is layering: bend a low branch down, nick the underside, peg it into the soil and leave it for a full season, then sever it and move it while dormant. Soft tip cuttings taken in early summer under mist will root, but they are slow, and the seedlings that follow from home-saved seed are variable in colour. Transplant the young plant only once, while it is small, because the shrub makes a fleshy root system that resents being dug up and is easily killed by breaking the main root.
Magnolias do not seal a wound quickly, and a large cut made in spring bleeds and can rot. If shaping is necessary, take out one or two of the oldest stems at ground level immediately after flowering, using a clean saw and leaving no stub, and avoid any pruning at all during the winter. A sheltered site, deep neutral to slightly acid soil and a mulch of leaf mould suit it far better than the dry, thin ground under a wall, and a late frost is the only problem it is likely to meet in a temperate garden.
Our Take
Raise your own from seed for the colour lottery, but buy a named clone if you want a particular shade, and plant it where the early flowers will be protected from morning sun after a frosty night. For wider planting choices in the family, see our pages on white magnolia, the other parent of the saucer hybrid, and saucer magnolia itself. Kobus magnolia is the tougher choice for an exposed garden.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Lily Magnolia: