North Carolina Botanical Garden
For this walk we set out to locate the bigleaf magnolia specimen at the botanical garden because we heard its leaves were changing color for fall. But along the way I spotted an adorable titmouse waiting for a turn at the birdfeeder…
The native range of this southeastern tree is spotty, but the botanical garden is home to this majestic magnolia.
The bigleaf magnolia has the largest simple leaves and largest flowers of any tree indigenous to North America. It is a rare, native, deciduous, pyramidal tree with a single trunk and develops a spreading, broad, rounded crown with age, and grows 30 to 40 feet tall and equally as wide. It may be semi-evergreen in the deep south. The huge oblong-obovate leaves measure up to 3 feet long and 1 foot wide. The leaves are green above and silvery-gray and pubescent below. Showy fragrant flowers are creamy-white with rose-purple at the petal bases, and measure 8 to 14 inches in diameter. Although quite large, the flowers are often located far off the ground and are not always easy to see close up. The flowers give way to spherical cone-like fruits which mature to red in late summer, releasing individual red-coated seeds suspended on slender threads at maturity.
~ N.C. Cooperative Extension website
I have to admit I haven’t paid too much attention to this tree, even though we pass by it often in the Mountain Habitat part of the garden. I will try to look up more often to see if I can see the flowers and then the seeds in the coming seasons. But for now, these are the huge leaves in their fall colors.
Perhaps because the flowers are located so far off the ground is the reason I never noticed them before. I hope the zoom lens on my camera can get some pictures of them in the spring.
to the bigleaf magnolia canopy
I love the contrast between the size and colors of the dogwood leaves and the huge magnolia leaves, high above them. Since the dogwood leaves are closer to the camera and they still seem much smaller it gives a little perspective.
wonderful and lovely. I am enchanted by your photos and the garden, as always
Thank you, Leelah. 💗 It’s so nice to know you’re still enjoying my little offerings. 🍂
Beautiful pics for the season.
Thanks very much, Frank. 🍂
Lovely specimen and that last shot is so nice! 🍂🍁💛
Thank you, Eliza! It was magical looking up under those leaves in the last shot. 🍂🐿️🍂
The bigleaf magnolia always grabs my attention too. Love your photos.
Thank you, Susie. A few days later there was a huge magnolia leaf carpet on the ground. 🍂
I’ve always been fond of magnolias, Barbara. They’re just such a perfect specimen of the South. I’d never heard of a big-leafed one though. It certainly has a nice Fall color — and oh, that titmouse and cardinal are splendid additions to your post!
Thank you, Debbie! That titmouse was so cute. I was amazed to learn that there are hundreds of kinds of magnolias. When my daughter moved down here 11 years ago she fell in love with all the magnolias when they started blooming and welcoming her to the South. 🍂
That Titmouse is so darn cute Barbara. And the Cardinal as well as it plays peekaboo. 🙂
Magnolias are beautiful; this type was something new for me. My neighbor next door has a Magnolia bush out front and it bloomed five times this year since the initial bloom in the Spring! With our warm weather the past few days and today, I wouldn’t be surprised if it bloomed again.
Thank you, Linda! Besides being such an adorable titmouse I loved the way his rusty feather patches perfectly matched the rusty patches on the leaves. The range of bigleaf magnolias is very small. I wonder if your neighbor’s magnolia will bloom next year? The internet says that remontant blooming in one season can reduce the number of magnolia flowers that bloom in the following year. It will be interesting to see what happens. 🍂
They are such adorable little birds – I can see why Jocelyn Anderson considers them her favorite birds. Sadly, I have only seen one titmouse. I learned a new word: “remontant” – never heard that word before as a gardening term. It will be interesting to see if it blooms as many times in 2025.
I had never heard of the word remontant before, either. 😉 I stumbled across it when I googled magnolias blooming more than once in a season. I think titmice are tied with chickadees and juncos for my favorite songbirds. ♡
Well, we both learned a new word Barbara. It is always good to learn new things, so think what we would have missed if we did not have Google at the end of our fingertips. Once upon a time, Windows 95 maybe, it was “Ask Jeeves” for all that info, long before Google. I agree with you – those cute and roundish birds all have the sweetest faces. I envy Jocelyn’s ease in getting them to land in her hand to feed and photograph them. I hoped one day to try that at the Park with the chickadees but they are skittish and remain on a nearby branch waiting for me to leave.
It sounds like you’ve been online a lot longer than I have — I never heard of Ask Jeeves. Tim dragged me kicking and screaming to connect with the internet, showing me how I could contact other people interested in genealogy. He got me started on the old Family Tree Maker program. Then he got me Microsoft FrontPage and I taught myself how to make a primitive looking website for our family history. That lasted until I found a friend’s WordPress blog and decided to use WordPress instead of FrontPage, which is now discontinued. What a journey it’s been.
I have been online since right before Y2K. Our Firm computers were called “dummy terminals” as all we could do was type and access Firm files, but had no connection to the outside world. We had an antiquated intranet called “Pine e-mail” where we could connect with one another in the office, which was used by the Firm for intraoffice memos, just to save paper primarily, but it was nothing like the internet as we know it today. Just before Y2K, since everyone believed that computer systems may have a big failure, the Firm got new computers with Windows, so we could connect to the outside world, just around 25 years ago at this time. No classes at all, so I took one over at the City. “Ask Jeeves” was very clever – it was a British butler and you asked your question and he would answer. I remember my neighbor Marge being interested in family trees and that was a hobby of hers. I think she used Ancestry. Thank you to Tim for getting Barbara interested in the internet back then and evolving into your ancestry files and your blog.
Interesting to learn about your experiences with an early intranet at work. I remember a lot of concerned conversations about Y2K as it was approaching, but my understanding of what was at stake wasn’t very clear. But I do remember reading in one of my genealogy newsletters that “genealogy and computers were made for each other.” Sometimes I marvel at the advances made in such a short time. While my mother was battling cancer she had made it online into genealogy chat rooms. (Are chat rooms still a thing?) She died in 1991. When Cyndi’s List, a free online genealogy resource, came out in 1995 I remember feeling sad that she didn’t live long enough to see that. But I am glad that before she died we got a chance to go to Boston together to spend a day at the huge library of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
We had to use Pine e-mail since we had a Unix-based system at our firm, which was kind of fickle and prone to crashing, especially when it was month-end when everyone was putting in their attorney’s time records and the Accounting Department was ready to generate the invoices. We would crash for no reason at all, so they worried we’d lose all our data, so that’s how we ended up with Windows and new computers in the last few weeks of 1999. I had a difficult time getting the mouse clicks right. I did not click quickly enough as I recall and since I did not buy my first computer until January 2000 as I worried about what might happen with Y2K, I used to go into work early and practice mouse clicks by playing Solitaire to get my clicking down pat. (I still like Solitaire.) That is a good question about chat rooms … I remember my neighbor Marge had some early genealogy software, long before Ancestrydotcom was available. She connected to another woman with the same name as hers (Marge Aubin) and they remained e-friends until Marge passed away. What a shame your mom didn’t live to see how Cyndi’s List worked. So, all New Englander’s birth and death records can be found in this huge library then? That is interesting. You two had a treasure trove of info to see in your day there. My friend Carol did my “tree” – not much there in my immediate family, but my grandmother had eight siblings so my mom said there were many cousins to mix and mingle with at her grandparents’ farm when she was growing up.
I don’t remember if the NEHGS library had copies of vital records, those can be found in town halls. The NEHGS library had countless published genealogies, local histories, reference works, and genealogy society periodicals. I could have been happy there for weeks, but then I learned we could borrow a lot of the books by mail. The book could easily be returned using the same box they sent it in. Since many of these books are out of print it is a real treasure trove of information.
That’s interesting Barbara and more interesting is that they are happy to have the book go back and forth by U.S. Mail. I was thinking it might be on microfiche which often takes a while to search for what you want.
Such a beautiful picture.
Thank you, Peggy! It’s lovely to see you here. I hope you are doing well. 🍂