Tsoongiodendron odorum Seeds | Tsoong’s Tree
LATIN NAME: Tsoongiodendron odorum
COMMON NAME: Tsoong’s Tree
Plant Profile
Most plants are named for a place or a surname. This one is named for a first name. Tsoongiodendron odorum carries the memory of Tsoong Kuan-kwang, the Chinese botanist who did much of the early collecting in these forests, and the Chinese name Guanguangmu takes his given name directly. Very few trees carry a person’s first name in their botanical name and their everyday name at once.
The tree was described as a genus of its own, distinguished from the michelieas by the way its fruit sits on an elongated stalk and by details of the flower. Against that, modern classifications sink the whole michelioid group into a broadly drawn Magnolia, so the same tree can be found in the literature as Tsoongiodendron odorum, as Michelia odora, or as Magnolia odora. For a grower the practical point is that the plant is unchanged, while its label depends on which authority the catalogue follows.
The fruit is the most distinctive feature in the hand: a woody, ellipsoid aggregate built from many follicles fused along a central axis, pale green turning brown, and covered in small white dots that read as speckles. It ripens in autumn and eventually splits to release seeds with a fleshy red coat that makes them impossible to miss against the dark foliage. The red coat is a reward for birds, which carry the seed away and drop the hard black kernel.
The flowers are large, cup-shaped and cream to pale yellow, with nine or ten tepals and a faint reddish flush near the base, and they carry a fragrance that travels a long way on a still evening. Their geometry is deliberately simple: the outer tepals open wide while the inner ones stay cupped over the flower centre, so the receptive stigmas stand in their own small chamber. Insects that push in for nectar become the pollen carriers.
Like most magnolias, the flower is protogynous: the stigmas are receptive first and the stamens shed their pollen later, which is a simple mechanical way of making self-pollination difficult. The closed chamber helps too, since pollen carried in on an insect is more likely to reach a stigma before the flower’s own anthers open. Seed from a wild tree is therefore usually the product of a cross.
Science & Biotechnology
The fragrance is a mix of volatile terpenoids and benzenoid compounds, the same chemical families that give the michelioid magnolias their characteristic sweet scent, and it is strongest in the evening. Studies of this group commonly recover compounds such as linalool, methyl benzoate and various sesquiterpenes, along with the waxes that give the tepals their sheen.
Uses & Benefits
The flowers have been distilled and extracted locally for perfumery work, in the same tradition that treats the other michelioid species as sources of floral oil. Flower-oil production is a small industry and depends on trees that flower heavily and reliably. A few mature specimens yield a useful quantity of tepals in a season without harm, since only the flowers are taken and the foliage is left intact.
Growing from Seed
Because old wild trees are scarce and clonal multiplication is the only way to preserve a good form, tissue culture has been applied across the family. Protocols for magnolias typically raise callus from immature seed or from leaf tissue, push it into somatic embryos on a hormone-step medium, and then grow the embryos out into shoots. For a species with a narrow genetic base it is as much a conservation tool as a propagation method.
Magnolia seed will not sit in a drawer. The fleshy coat holds a lot of water, and once the seed dries below a fairly high threshold it loses the ability to grow, which is why the group is described as recalcitrant in storage terms. Practical handling follows from that: clean the red coat off as soon as the fruit splits, keep the seed damp in a bag of moist peat or vermiculite, and sow it as soon as the season allows. Cold storage buys a few months at best.
Treat the seed as if it were a berry. Rub the red coat away with wet sand, rinse, and sow at once in a mix of sieved leafmould, coarse bark and grit, covering each seed by about its own thickness. Keep the pan in a warm, humid frame with shade from strong sun, and do not let the medium dry between waterings. Move each seedling into a deep, free-draining pot once it has two or three true leaves, because the root is fleshy and resents disturbance.
Young plants want the shelter of a woodland edge: bright filtered light, a windbreak, and soil that holds moisture without staying wet. The leaves scorch in a hot exposed site and the young stems can be cut back by frost, so keep them in containers under cover for the first winter or two, then plant out in spring into ground enriched with well-rotted organic matter. Water steadily through the first three summers and mulch deeply.
Our Take
The first time one of these flowered for me I understood why the group has such a following: the scent arrives before you find the tree. I grow it in the same sheltered corner as the michelieas I raise from Michelia figo seed, which have the same taste for moist shade and warm air, and I have planted a slower Magnolia grandiflora nearby for evergreen structure through the winter, with the tulip tree raised from Liriodendron chinense seed a little further back as a bold foil. Keep the seed damp, plant it fresh, and give the young tree a deep root run.
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Tsoong’s Tree often pair it with these related subjects: