michelia

The following guest post comes from Kay Phelps, production manager at Clinton Nurseries of Florida, the Havana, Florida location of Clinton Nurseries, a regional wholesale grower of perennial and ornamental nursery stock. Here, Kay answers a few questions about Fairy Magnolia^® Blush, the first in the long-awaited Fairy Magnolias michelia hybrid series by renowned New Zealand breeder Mark Jury.

Kay Phelps with Fairy Magnolias

What are Fairy Magnolias?

Mostly grown as a thick hedge, this upright, compact and bushy plant tops out at 9 to 12 feet tall by 8 to 9 feet wide. Fairy Magnolia Blush has large, glossy, dark green leaves with dark chocolate, silky, shiny flower buds through the winter months. Then, with the first signs of spring, it gradually blooms into a blast of sweet, aromatic, pink- to blush-pink blooms. It’s not your typical grandmother’s “banana shrub” (a common name used for these types of magnolias). The blooms are not the half-inch sized bloom …. more like 2 ½  inches! (More information can be found here, on Tesselaar’s Fairy Magnolias fact sheet.)

Fairy Magnolia Blush close-up (left) and as a hedge (right)

What do you like about Fairy Magnolias?

They make a great flowering hedge or screening plant with spectacular blooming from February through May. They also have few, if any, pests and are extremely low maintenance (no maintenance, really, if you’re not concerned with height).  In Zones 7b through 11, they can be grown as an evergreen specimen plant, perhaps trained into a tree or even an espalier (see photo below). In Zone 7, they’ll serve as semi-deciduous shrubs.

Fairy Magnolia Blush as an espalier

How did you decide to grow Fairy Magnolias?

Back in 2007, after years of breeding and extensive trials, Tesselaar Plants was ready to make a new michelia hybrid available to the United States market.  As a licensed Tesselaar grower, we here at Clinton were asked if we would be willing to serve as the nursery to handle the initial production of Michelia Jury 01 for the US.  (The plant is now known as Fairy Magnolia Blush.)  I was very excited about this stunning, new, soon-to-be-released plant. I felt  it would be a great hit here in the US and was very glad to have been selected to handle the production management.

We now provide Fairy Magnolia Blush to other licensed Tesselaar growers who service garden centers in Zones 7 -11.  We also sell to our own Clinton wholesale customers in those warmer zones.

I’m very excited about new breeding and trials that are currently underway here for new Jury michelias that may be available in a few years’ time.

Fairy Magnolia Blush on site at Clinton Nurseries in Florida

What are people saying about it?

Customers have been raving not only about the beauty of the flower itself, but the fact that it’s fragrant, too. That’s something that’s very desirable, yet elusive in today’s gardening plants. People also love that it’s a flowering bush – a blooming powerhouse at that, with a bloom at every leaf axil. And they particularly appreciate the fact that it grows into such a thick, bushy hedge in such little time, with lush, evergreen foliage – right to the bottom – year round.

Fairy Magnolia Blush at Tesselaar's trial site in Silvan, Australia

Some people have remarked that Fairy Magnolias will come to replace photinias and/or camellias. Your thoughts?

I would think it would be a much better substitution for the photinia hedge.  It won’t have the fabraea problems (a terrible leaf spot disease that attacks closely spaced photinia). However, I would still recommend spacing Fairy Magnolia plants no closer than 8 feet apart. This ensures a more healthy plant and much showier stage of bloom. As for replacing camellias, I don’t believe in replacing one of the beauties that God has created. I see it rather as a new companion to the garden.

Photinia hedge

 Camellias

How and when can people get Fairy Magnolias?

They’re available this year to retailers in Zones 7b through 11.

Hey there! I just returned from the Garden Writers Association symposium 2010 (click on the link to read all about it at The Garden Buzz blog). It was held last week in Dallas, Texas and I've FINALLY gotten around to sharing all the great pics, videos and info I gathered there.

As representatives for Tesselaar Plants, my colleage Laurie Riedman and I of course immediately checked out the Tropicanna Black cannas on display at the Monrovia booth. (Tropicanna Black, the dark-leaved and dramatic, yet elusive, member of the wildly popular Tropicanna line of cannas, will be widely available to the public after being held back for a few years because of propagation issues).

Tropicanna Black cannas at Monrovia display at GWA symposium 2010

At the Monrovia display, next to a beautiful stand of Tropicanna Black with its tropical, purplish-black foliage and coral-red blooms with gold-speckled throats, we made this YouTube video with Nicholas Staddon (Monrovia's director of new plants). In the video, Staddon shows how this purplish-black color is the hip accent for gardens right now, making for beautiful contrasts against yellow-lime evergreens and enhancing the purple-blue colors of a nearby clematis and Monrovia's new Bountiful Blue™ blueberry (featuring unique, blue-green foliage that turns pinkish-lavender in the fall).

Tropicanna Black contrasting beautifully with yellow-lime foliage:

Monrovia's new Bountiful Blue blueberry (also great paired with Tropicanna Black):

Over Staddon's shoulder, incidentally, you can see another Tesselaar plant – Fairy Magnolia™ blush. This new michelia hybrid, with heavenly-scented, blushed-pink blooms that are a cross between a magnolia and camellia, is the first in a long-awaited series of Fairy Magnolias from Aussie breeder Mark Jury.

While we were at the Monrovia booth with our video camera out, we also grabbed poor Steve Bender (aka Southern Living's Grumpy Gardener, who was trying to make his way to the lunch tables) and asked him why container gardening remains such a hot trend. We had just shown him pots of Tropicanna Black and the 'Bountiful Blue' blueberries in containers. To see his response, check out this YouTube video.

Steve Bender (aka Southern Living's Grumpy Gardener) talks about containers in our video:

Speaking of Tropicanna Black and containers, we saw other cannas from the Tropicanna line (the original, with rainbow-striped foliage and tangerine blooms, and the gold-striped, gold-bloomed Tropicanna Gold). Later, on the symposium's field trip to the world-famous Dallas Arboretum, we got some great ideas for using these tropical beauties. In this YouTube video, for instance, Dallas Arboretum staff member Jenny Wegley shows a beautiful thriller-filler-spiller combination with Tropicanna Gold at top (as the thriller), multicolored ornamental peppers (as the filler) and black ipomoea, or sweet potato vine, (as the spiller). Gorgeous!

Tropicanna Gold cannas (at top, the "thriller"), ornamental peppers (in the middle, as the "filler") and black ipomoea, or sweet potato vine, (on the bottom, as the "spiller"):

More GWA 2010 info, pics and video to come! Stay tuned – I should have it up within a few days, at the most!

Ever dreamed about vacationing in Australia? I know I have. Well here, at least, you can take a trip through its most beautiful site (aside from the 'roos, sand, sun, surf and Sydney Opera House, of course) – the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show. Spend a few minutes down under and enjoy some dramatic flowers and fantastic foliage with this guest post from Phillip Townshend, global operations director for Tesselaar Plants.

With the chocolate coma starting to fade and the Easter Break well and truly over, I thought it time to send a quick update on the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, which was held just prior to Easter from the 24^th through the 28^th of March. This internationally famous show, held for the past 15 years at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Garden (below), is still an explosion of color and design. It's also the biggest annual flower garden show in the Southern Hemisphere!

Highlighting the creativity and passion of Australia's top floral and landscape designers, the Melbourne show is the horticultural industry’s premier showcase for a stunning array of inspirational displays and environmentally friendly ideas. As always, highlights included the floral spectacular inside the Great Hall of Flowers, the Children's Garden with its animal petting zoo and numerous show gardens created by some of Australia's most lauded landscape designers (all of which left me wondering why I never see the design opportunities the professionals do when working in my own garden).

Particularly inspirational for me was the outdoor exhibition of garden sculptures (below) organized by the Association of Sculptors of Victoria. All sculptures are for sale and range in price from a few hundred dollars to several thousand. I really like the huge metal sculpture of a rose. The next time someone asks me how tough Flower Carpet^® roses are, I'm going to show them this picture!

Of course, we were at the show on business, too. And as always, Tesselaar was actively involved, hosting the media tent and celebrating our wildly popular new plant introduction, Fairy Magnolias (below) with cupcakes and pink bubbly.

One thing that really surprised all of us was the absolute interest in the new Fairy Magnolias. Everyone loved the versatility of the plant (suitable for specimens, hedging or espalier (see second image, below) and how floriferous it was, with a bud at every leaf axil.

In a nutshell, the main points that people liked were the flower, light fragrance, the fact that it was a flowering bush that could be used for hedging, the year-round lush green foliage and rapid growth.

And Tropicanna® Canna (which will soon appear in stores in the Northern Hemisphere) continues to wow garden designers, with its inclusion in many of the show's displays.

 Here I am with Tropicanna Black (its purple-black leaves soon to be topped by a coral bloom with bright-yellow edging) and Tropicanna Gold (its green, yellow and golden leaves soon to showcase a sunny, yellow-gold flower). And below that, you can see the original Tropicanna Canna that started it all in a garden setting, soon to show off its bright tangerine bloom.

Anyway, should you be planning a trip to Australia any time in the future, try to visit during the Melbourne International Flower & Garden show. It is truly a spectacular celebration of the Australian lifestyle and our great outdoors, with some of the world’s leading floral and landscape designers, all in the beautiful Carlton Gardens with great food and lots of family fun!

Today’s guest blogger is Abbie Jury (at right), a garden writer whose husband Mark Jury, bred the new Fairy Magnolia^® Blush being introduced by Tesselaar this year. Click here for Abbie’s column.

The first of the long-awaited michelia hybrids by these renowned New Zealand plant breeders to be released in the U.S., Fairy Magnolia Blush delivers lilac-pink, lightly fragrant flowers, preceded by velvet-textured, russet-colored buds accompanied by evergreen foliage resembling a camellia without the gloss. An upright, compact, bushy shrub, it reaches 8’ high by 6’ wide and is hardy in Zones 7b through 10, where it blooms from late winter through early spring.

“It could shape up to be the next big thing among savvy gardeners and landscapers,” raved the Taranaki Daily News (in Taranaki, New Zealand, where Fairy Magnolia Blush was first introduced). “Gardeners looking for an alternative to the tried-and-true camellias or the elegant but sometimes too-big magnolias should swoop in on this michelia.”

For more info on michelias and design ideas/companion plantings, see my earlier post on Fairy Magnolia Blush.

What are michelias?

By Abbie Jury, of Tikorangi – The Jury Garden

Michelias have been a passion of ours at Tikorangi for nigh on twenty years – despite there only being about five different species and two hybrids reasonably available in New Zealand (and three of those species are a relatively recent import). Mark has not let this deter him, and we now have hundreds of hybrids, probably well over a thousand (but who can be bothered counting?).

The genus has recently been reclassified by the botanists as magnolias. This action is not solely designed to confuse the home gardener or the producer, although both often tend to interpret reclassifications as a personal irritant. At this stage, we still refer to them as michelias for clarity. But over time, the revised nomenclature will take precedence.

The doltsopa and figo species have been around for a long time. We’ve never considered doltsopa to have commercial merit, however, because it’s such a huge tree. In flower, it’s a remarkable sight, but it takes up a space comparable to your average city block.  Plus, some forms may take a very long time to flower, and even then fail to put on a good display. ‘Silver Cloud’ (available in New Zealand) is the best known named form of doltsopa, and its deliciously fragrant floral display is impressive, but it’s tough to find and can also get too large. It also tends to defoliate after flowering, especially in cooler climates, so it can have very raggy times of the year. Finally, its flower, while large and fragrant, is rather floppy and lacks good form.

Figo, meanwhile, is often referred to as the port wine magnolia and is used very widely in New Zealand, particularly by landscapers as a large, useful evergreen shrub that will take clipping and that has a strong scent (reminds me of Juicy Fruit chewing gum). Again, it is a less-than-perfect plant. For one, it’s night-scented, so don’t be expecting to be bowled over by its fragrance. Of more concern is a tendency for the foliage to yellow at certain times of the year, when the plant is under stress or in full sun. Traditionally, we have had only one form of figo produced commercially in New Zealand – a form marked by its small flowers with purple and yellow tones. Being a species, it has considerable variations in form and overseas you may well spot different figos. Some of these different selections are now starting to appear in New Zealand, though we have yet to see one with lovely dark foliage.

In the 1970s, the late plant breeder Os Blumhardt crossed figo and doltsopa (a cross sometimes referred to as foggii hybrids). He raised a few seedlings and named three – ‘Mixed Up Miss,’ ‘Bubbles’ and ‘Hint of Pink.’ These hybrids gave a hint of what is possible: predominantly white flowers with a flush of pink on smaller growing trees suitable for home gardens – an intermediate between the shrubby figo and the large tree of doltsopa. They did, however, lose much of the fragrance.

Then in the 1990s, several new michelia species became available in New Zealand, but it was yunnanensis (or, more technically, Magnolia dianica) that attracted the most attention. A Chinese form, it is hardy, growing to a large shrub or small tree with small leaves and mass flowers with lightly scented, creamy-white goblets. Once established, it can be clipped.

Around the same time, a few plants of the tropical species champaca and the natural hybrid alba started to appear. Champaca is orange-flowered and very fragrant (in fact, it’s used in one of the world’s most expensive perfumes) but doesn’t offer the mass flowering common to many other species. Alba is the sought-after form. Although its creamy-yellow, spidery-shaped flowers aren’t particularly eye catching, it is coveted for its divine fragrance and extended flowering season.  In mild areas, it quickly grows to a fairly large tree with dense, glossy foliage.

If you want a michelia alba, it is one of those plants you may search long and hard to find, even in New Zealand, though we have seen it used as street trees throughout Asia.  

When the dreaded petal blight hit camellias, Mark stopped doing anything with breeding that genus and turned his attention to michelias, thinking that it’d be possible to get color into their flowers and to improve the foliage and form of some of the species to get better garden plants. Maudiae and yunnanensis, in particular, offered the promise of more hardiness for colder areas.

An increased color range in the flowers? Yes, definitely. We have pinks, yellows, green tones, creams and a whole range of bicolors and color mixes. That part of the breeding program has been most successful from the start. So too has the quest for better foliage been successful in a whole range of plants that stay relatively compact and bushy, losing the off colors of murky olive green or yellow as well as the tendency to defoliate after flowering.

Fragrance has been a problem and it is something of a disappointment when the offspring of two of the most fragrant species fail to inherit anything more than a mere hint of the sweet scent. Mark has been continuing breeding down the generations and back crossing hybrids to one of the originating species to reinstate the scent.

For a plant breeder, the quest for perfection is never ending. The combination of really good form, foliage, bud and flower color, fragrance, performance and ease of propagation is an elusive quest. Quite possibly, the more you have to choose from the harder it becomes to make a decision. But decisions have been made here on the first round of michelia selections and this year sees the release of the first of the colored-flowered varieties. Fairy Magnolia Blush introduces distinctively pink tones to good-sized flowers on a compact, large shrub. Other colors will follow under the Fairy Magnolia brand.

There are few plant genera as healthy and forgiving as michelias in the garden. They grow equally well in sun or shade and have no particular problems with pests or diseases. We never spray any of the plants once they are out of the nursery and we only clip or prune to shape. With so many seedlings to play with, we’ve had the luxury of using them as feature plants, hedges, shelter belts for the larger growing crosses, topiary and now we are pleaching (braiding or interlacing) a row of one variety for use in a new garden. We see them occupying a similar garden niche to the versatile camellia but without that plant genus’ disadvantages (susceptibility to petal blight, root rot, leaf gall, cankers and bud drop).

Of course, in everything there’s an opportunity for improvement, but until then – Fairy Magnolias are as good as it gets when it comes to this exciting new plant for warm-climate gardens!

A footnote from Lisa:

Fairy Magnolia Blush has already made a huge splash in Australia at the recent Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. Here’s what show visitors said they loved about it:

• Love the flower itself, AND it’s slightly fragrant too!
• FLOWERING BUSH – Wow, we have been waiting for something like this for ages – there is a flower bud at every leaf axel …
• It will take over from photinia (a red-tipped shrub used for fence rows).
• LOVE the hedge–like effect.
• Rich lush green foliage year round.
• It’s green right to the bottom.
• And it grows into a thick solid hedge in such a short time.