An in-depth guide to magnolias and how to plant them for beautiful blooms | House & Garden

Perhaps the most beautiful of flowering trees, magnolias are adorned with luxurious, flamboyant flowers in spring and summer. These generous blooms are goblet- or saucer-shaped and a handful or more in size.

Named after the French botanist Pierre Magnol, the Magnolia genus comprises over 200 species of trees and shrubs from temperate, subtropical, and tropical regions of Asia and the Americas. Unsurprisingly, their hardiness varies. Many are deciduous; a few are evergreen. Some are small enough for a pot; others are gorgeous monsters that scale 30 metres.

You would have to be a dinosaur to be able to sniff the fragrant flowers blooming on the high branches of the taller magnolias, and fossil records indicate that – once upon a time – that might have been a common sight. Modern-day magnolias have evolved from ancestral plants in the Magnoliaceae family that flowered 95 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. At that time, bees didn’t exist, and so magnolias developed to be pollinated by beetles. Many of today’s magnolias are ancient, including M. acuminata, which grew 20 million years ago and has been used to breed fabulous yellow-flowered hybrids.

In the UK, the magnolia most of us are most familiar with is M. x soulangeana, which blooms in urban gardens in spring. The only tree able to steal the show from the flowering cherries, it can stop you in your tracks. From a distance, the beautiful flowers resemble pink paper lanterns or a flock of birds resting upon the bare branches. Up close, they are silky, lotus-like, and sometimes enormous: ranging from 8 to 30 centimetres wide, depending on the cultivar.

M. x soulangeana arrived in England in 1827, having been raised in France around