Carpel Diem: Southern, Northern and Learning About Magnolias

This is my third post featuring some of the shots I took on Mother’s Day at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens. For this post, I decided to focus on the beauty of the magnolias this year and added a few more pictures from a 2009 trip to Mount Vernon.

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I often thought of magnolias as a southern thing. Cliches firmly held in my cheek by my tongue, I imagined members of the Magnolia Society, on steamy hot August afternoons, laying on a blanket looking up at the magnolia trees covered in big, beautiful and steely cream colored flowers, sipping mint juleps in the garden of good and evil.

Magnolias are not limited to the southern parts of the United States as we found when we were at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens in May. The only other time I paid particular attention to magnolias was on a trip to Mount Vernon several years ago. At that time, I was fascinated with the reproductive carpels and the anthers which looked like delicate matchsticks. After sorting through my favorite magnolia photos, I did a little more research on magnolias as I consider redesigns of my own gardens here in the northeast.

I particular liked Martha Stewart’s video about magnolias. It’s a nice overview of magnolias given by Andrew Bunting, the curator of the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College. And if you are really into learning more about growing magnolias, here is a longer one from a 2008 episode of Martha Stewart Living. It is a more in-depth 10 minute video on magnolias.