Edith Wharton was not drawn to the poor and the ordinary. This was a woman who dined with Henry James at the Villa Medici, who wrote novels in bed, completing each page and throwing it off the side for her secretary to find and type out. For decades she froze the high society of America and Europe on her pages, then froze them again, in person, at their parties. However, in her early short story, Mrs Manstey’s View, she takes an enjoyable detour into a more ordinary reality.
Mrs Manstey rents a room in a shabby New York brownstone. All day she sits at the window, her mind entirely on the view. She is almost interested in the people she sees (noisy slatterns, she surmises), but it is the glimpsed gardens that attract her. They are disordered wastes mostly, but there is a magnolia in the next lot, and a wisteria that flowers each May.
The widow half-listens to her infrequent visitors and wishes they would leave. After 17 years with her eyes on their branches and blossom, she finds it hard to tear herself from the plants. They have ‘surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island.’ Her landlady pops up and Mrs Manstey daringly breaks with convention and talks about her true love. ‘The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs Sampson,’ she ventures. The reply she receives could not be more shocking. ‘Is it, indeed?’ says Mrs Sampson. ‘I didn’t know there was a magnolia there.’
The story ends in arson and death, but on the way it is a precise observation on subjective experience. If just one thing matters, then it matters a lot. Mrs Manstey’s life has been boiled down to almost nothing but her passions have not cooked off, they have just been concentrated. The landlady’s ignorance of the flowering magnolia is a sign of a world gone wrong. Mrs Manstey must sharpen her metaphorical sword and be prepared to fight for what she loves, and fight alone. It’s a good story but I wish Wharton hadn’t chosen magnolia as the plant of revelation. It’s unrealistic and breaks the illusion. If a magnolia is in flower then everyone knows it’s in flower.
Magnolias are thermogenic and their blooms produce real cellular heat. This is thought to be a reward for pollinating beetles and an encouragement for them to linger. Our traditional garden magnolias, the ones foregrounding those Cookham paintings by Stanley Spencer, come from the forests of East Asia where spring can be cold and long. What a boon the candle of warmth must be for Zhejiang Province sap beetles, newly emerged in early March with snow still on the hills. Mrs Manstey herself could not appreciate the petals more.
A secondary effect of magnolia’s metabolic warming is an amplification of the tree’s scent, a sweet, lemony tang, dominated by linalool, the terpene alcohol found in tangerine peel and lavender flowers. The temperature peaks when the flower is in its female phase. It then dips and spikes again when the bloom enters its subsequent male stage. Female-then-male maturation lessens the chance of self-pollination. The stigma are receptive before the petals have even opened. They are waiting for pollen-strewn beetles to force their way into the bud after feeding in another tree. By the time the flower is fully open and producing male gametophytes, its own ovaries have become inaccessible. Beetles remain in the cooling bloom, consuming the calorie-rich pollen, and then follow the lavender and tangerine smells to the next warm, female-phase tree. It is an elegant and simple solution, befitting of magnolia’s status as the premier ‘primitive’ plant.
Perhaps this pre-flowering fertility is why magnolias are unusually attractive in the week before they open. At No.4 Grove Park there are two spreading trees, both hybrid soulangeana cultivars. From St David’s Day, on the first of March, cream and magenta candles stood on their bare wood like chicory hearts, each aligned to the sky no matter the angle of the branch below. They stopped people on the pavement and made them point. Many buds are beautiful. There is a clematis growing behind the bike stands on Warwick Square that stuns me every spring. It looks as if a champagne meteor has fizzed along the railings, leaving sprigs of bright, rosé-tinged bubbles in its wake. But the elation it provokes is anticipatory, it comes with knowing the ironwork will soon be buried in cruciform flowers. A budding magnolia does not need the promise of a finale, it is perfect in that moment alone. The clematis is dawn on a wedding day, made beautiful by what is to come, the magnolia is sunrise itself. And all because it favours beetles over bees.
Had the magnolia evolved in a time of bees it might have shaped itself to make better use of them. It would not have such robust and architectural flowers. Bees are remarkable pollinators and there is no need to trap them in a thick-walled floral cavern to ensure the job gets done. They are the posited answer to Charles Darwin’s famous ‘abominable mystery’ of why higher plants appear in the fossil record so suddenly at the end of the Cretaceous period and diversify so incredibly quickly. The flying bee, as an unparalleled distributer of DNA, kicked off a bidding war between angiosperms – more petals, more nectar and more specialized means of its delivery. Come to me, says one plant, my tube is long and my juice is sweet, perfect for that extended tongue you seem to be developing; you’ll recognize me by my blue petals, lets co-evolve. Another hawks good, dense calories at the stem with the red sepals and promises to bloom in a conveniently simultaneous rush, all across the forest and savannah. Honey bees like to feed on one flower at a time; they will sup on heather until the heather is finished and then move on to gorse. This is why we can produce monofloral honeys like chestnut and manuka from bees that have two square miles of diverse forage.
A bee that will fly over all distractions to spread pollen between members of a single species is a remarkable tool in the survival of the fittest. But it was not available to the magnolias when they developed their beetle-baiting aroma and their waxy petals. They sit within the family Magnoliaceae in an ancient order that appeared 96 million years ago and has changed little since. Magnoliales debuted in the Cenomanian Age when earth’s seas were at their highest and a marine reptile floating above one-day-to-be-London could swing its bus-length neck south and swim over the coral reef we call France (passing fern-covered islands that would become the Alps) into the Indian Ocean. The beetles and the magnolias were alone together for a further 30 million years before dinosaurs went extinct and the bees appeared, by which time our plant was well set in its ways.
In Grove Park, now dried out and 30 yards above sea level, the magnolia at No.102 comes out first. It faces south, on the hot side of the street, with a brick wall at its back and the black road at its feet. Opposite, in the garden of north-facing No.70, an identical plant follows it into flower a few days later. I wonder if beetles pass between them, commuting south from male phase to female over the parked BMWs and the little white Mazda. It would be a journey unknown in nature before the last two centuries. These plants are Magnolia x soulangeana, a hybrid created in the 1820s by Etienne Soulange-Bodin, a French cavalry officer recently returned from Napoleon’s army. He took pollen from the deep purple mulan magnolia (Magnolia liliiflora), deposited it on the stigma of the pure white yulan magnolia (Magnolia denudata), and from the seed raised a beautiful Frankenstein’s monster, fresh born from ancient parts. His plant was a smash, the entire stock bought out by hungry nurserymen who saw profit in its parts, its father’s quickness to flower, its mother’s stature and elegance, and its flowers – a couldn’t-have-designed-it-better gradient of paternal pink fading into maternal white.
This is the magnolia we know. Stanley Spencer’s magnolia. The magnolia our grandparents planted and left in their front gardens for us to enjoy. They survive better than any other tree, because what kind of psychopath would cut down a mature magnolia? There were peaks of planting in the 1930s and the 1950s, and London swims in seventy- and ninety-year-old specimens. These old trees fit their front gardens perfectly. These are trees coded for the forest glade. They do not try to pierce an imaginary canopy or lean away from the shadow of the house. Their forbears lived in the shade of Daurian birch and Mongolian oak and they grow symmetrically, even when the light is poor.
The two magnolias at No.4 spread as wide as they are tall. Money can’t purchase trees like these. They are bought in instalments, summer by summer, bud-break to leaf-drop, paid for in time itself. When I worked for the oligarch our brief was absurd: ‘Build the best garden in London. Better than the Queen’s’. This order was delivered by a trusted hanger-on, a man with a budget matched only by his paranoia. He once appeared with a print out of our projected outgoings and shouted, ‘You say you want to buy trees? But we have trees! Look! Tree, tree, tree!’ He pointed three times at different parts of an overgrown thuja hedge, left staked and half strangled by previous owners. We explained that these were not good trees and that they would never have been allowed to grow at Buckingham Palace. The spend was eventually signed off and the oligarch’s assistant retreated, telling us to buy the best trees in England, he would know if we hadn’t.
But of course we didn’t buy the best trees in England. There was no way we could. The best trees in England are not for sale. They are wedded to the place they have grown. Within a half mile of that North London mansion there were a thousand trees better than all the stock advertised in the nurseries of Kent, Italy and Holland. Those fragile, aged things had crowns wider than the slow lane of the M20 from Dover. They wouldn’t tessellate, sardine-like, on the back of an articulated lorry, as trussed up Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Slender Silhouette’ would. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on plants for the oligarch’s garden got him nothing approaching the quality of the trees at No.4. If you want something as magnificent as the Grove Park magnolias you do what the rest of us do, you plant it and bloody well wait. In a world where private jets were chartered to keep hairdressers in the right city, it was nice to know that even billions cannot buy everything.
