Fraser Magnolia

Check the leaf base

Fraser magnolia is the mountain magnolia, and two others with big leaves crowded at the branch tips get mixed up with it. Look where the leaf meets its stalk. Fraser’s narrows toward the base and then flares out into two small lobes, like ears. Umbrella magnolia’s tapers there with no lobes and is usually longer, often a foot or more. Bigleaf magnolia has eared leaves too, larger ones, but in North Carolina the two don’t share ground. Fraser’s buds are purple and hairless, which Julian Sutton of Trees and Shrubs Online gives as another way to separate it from bigleaf. William Bartram’s name for it, Magnolia auriculata, and the old name earleaf cucumbertree both point at those lobes.

The flowers open in spring, April and May in the North Carolina flora and May to June in the Forest Service silvics manual, which ties the timing to latitude, elevation and weather. They’re creamy white, sweet-scented and large: about eight inches across by the North Carolina account and eight to twelve by the silvics manual. Beetles pollinate them. By late summer the fruit is a cone-like cluster with red seeds, and the animals that eat it spread the seed. Good seed years come only every four or five years.

Where it grows

This is a southern Appalachian tree. The silvics manual traces it through the mountains of West Virginia, western Virginia, east Tennessee and western North Carolina, into the Blue Ridge of northwestern South Carolina and northeastern Georgia, and into the Cumberland Mountains of southeastern Kentucky. The North Carolina flora adds an outlier in northeastern Alabama and says it is essentially missing from the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. In North Carolina it’s known from every mountain county. It grows in cove forest, rich and acidic, and in other moist hardwood and mixed woods, usually at about 2,000 to 4,300 feet. In the gorges of the Blue Ridge front it is thickest on the lowest third of the slopes and on the bottoms, where it often grows as a clump of trunks from one base. The silvics manual describes study stands in the Great Craggy Mountains above Dillingham and near Grandfather Mountain, and notes it filling gaps left by fallen hemlocks in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Fast and short-lived

It starts quickly. In a cleaning study in the Pink Beds of the Pisgah National Forest it led yellow-poplar in diameter at eleven years and fell behind by twenty-one. It seldom makes up a tenth of any stand and often drops out at sixty or seventy years. Thin bark lets fire and logging wounds in, and rot follows. Thomas Walter named it in Flora Caroliniana in 1788 for John Fraser, the British plant collector who saw Walter’s book into print.