My mother passed away suddenly in October 2006. In a small ceremony in April 2007, we took her cremated remains and set them in the ground around the base of a newly planted magnolia tree in the backyard of her house.
The tree produced a single, full bloom the following spring. The next year it burst forth with over forty blooms, and has flourished since then.
If anyone recognizes what kind of magnolia this is, please let me know. I really have no idea. Click on the photos to see larger versions.
The three children (my two sisters and I) inherited the house from Mom, but my younger sister decided to "buy us out" and make it a proper home for her and her growing family. This summer she got promoted to a new job away from New Jersey, and so the house is finally going on the market after nearly 30 years in family hands. My mother actually built this house to her specifications in the mid 80's, after getting divorced from Dad and shipping my and my older sister off to college. It really is an incredibly unique and well-built house, with lush landscaping.
So my sister and her family are cleaning house and getting ready to move out. I wondered about the memorial magnolia. Could we move a 10-foot tall tree that was nearly a decade rooted into the ground? We consulted with an expert and they advised that while it was possible, and there were techniques for uprooting trees, the truth is that it would likely not survive the move. And then we would have done something even worse -- killed the tree, instead of just leaving it there to the fates. So scratch that idea.
Somebody suggested the idea of doing cuttings of the tree, taking small branch tips and rooting them into new pots. Hmmm, that's interesting. We talked to professionals and it did indeed seem doable; in fact, my research showed that summer is the ideal time to attempt this. I could take multiple cuttings, to improve the odds of getting at least one to take, and the original tree would still be there.
However, there was the matter of transportation. I was going to call up a local pro and hire them to do the cuttings, and then get the results transported somehow after they'd taken root, but I was advised that you can't really ship plants like this. That may or may not be true. But with other house cleanout activities, it seemed inevitable that my sister would have a car load of things for me to take anyway, so I decided to fly up and drive back. I'd load up the car with the rooted cuttings, and all the other junk, and drive it all down to Atlanta!
And so I commenced with research on exactly what I needed to do to get tree cuttings to root. Besides the obvious method of searching the internet, I got on the phone with plant expert up in that area and he walked me through the process. Actually I had originally wanted to hire them to do it for me, back before I realized that I really needed to do it myself.
On the designated weekend, I flew up and got a good look at the tree -- it looked perfectly healthy, if growing a bit oddly. I took one cutting and headed to the local nursery and talked to that expert again (thanks Jeff at Rutgers Nursery!) My original plan had been to to all the potting work in NJ before the drive, but he advised that it would probably be better to just keep the cuttings in water and then do the potting upon arrival.
So on the day of departure, I went out with a ladder to claim some cuttings. I decided to take 12 cuttings, loosely filling a bucket with them, and put a few inches of water in the bucket. I had brought an old plastic spray bottle with me and filled that up with water to mist the leaves during the drive.
The drive back to Atlanta normally takes 13 hours, PLUS stoppage time. I'm old enough that's it not worth the effort to pull that off in one shot anymore, so I decided to break up the trip with a stop in Washington DC. I'd drive the 3 hours to DC, then the 10 hours to Atlanta.
Of course, I had an ulterior motive, which was to stop at the Smithsonian. There is a new exhibit of some critical components that came out of the Hubble Space Telescope on the final servicing mission by the space shuttle in May 2009, and I had to see them for myself. It was utterly fascinating, and someday soon maybe I'll do a seperate writeup about it. No, this excellent article from the Smithsonian does as good a job as I would, and the has exact same photos I took.
Onwards! I continued to mist the plants at every stop during the drive, and when I arrived at home late that night. The next day I went out and got some Perlite, rooting hormone and pots, and followed the sequence per all my research and notes. Cut just below the node, peel off all but the top two leaves, cut those two remaining leaves in half (to reduce moisture loss), apply rooting hormone to stem tip, place in pots via pencil starter holes, and then water via misting. Of the original twelve cuttings to come down in the bucket, I picked the six most healthy looking.
As I write this, two weeks later, it doesn't look good. Of the six cuttings, five look pretty much dead, but one looks OK. The leaves are curled in an odd direction, but it's holding its own, and I'm hoping that it's generating roots down there. Per my reaserch, it needs to hang out in the Perlite for five weeks, generating roots in the Perlite, and then I can transfer to a new pot with potting soil. I wish I had more than just one cutting left to pin my hopes on, and I haven't actually given up on the five dead-looking ones. I just wish I had a better sense of how much watering I should be doing; from my research I got the impression that I really needed to be sparing with the water, which makes me very nervous, especially since I've probably killed five of the six so far.
My original hope was to get three cuttings to survive this, so I'd have one for each child (me and my two sisters), but at this point I'll settle for just one! It's frankly going to be a minor miracle if this works.