Sweetbay magnolia, a lovely tree with highly scented flowers

The beautiful sweetbay magnolia flower
is pollinated by beetles.

The sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) is lovely, mostly evergreen medium-sized tree with leaves that are dark green on top with silver undersides. It has beautiful, fragrant flowers and bright red fruits. It is tolerant of flooding, even with brackish water. It grows best in acid soil in full sun or partial shade.

It provides excellent habitat for wildlife. While it's pollinated by beetles, a wide variety of birds and other wildlife consume the fruits, plus it's the larval food source for several butterflies including the Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus) and the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilo glaucus). It should be planted much more often.

Sweetbay's native region
includes Massachusetts
to eastern Texas, to Cuba
including all of Florida.

Six magnolias native to Florida

- Cucumbertree (M. acuminata)
- Southern magnolia (M. grandiflora)

- Bigleaf magnolia (M. macrophylla var. ashei)

- Pyramid magnolia (M. pyramidata)
- Umbrella magnolia (M. tripetala)

- Sweetbay magnolia (M. virginiana)
  (Links are to the plant profiles for each of the magnolias on the Atlas of Florida Plants, so you can see their respective ranges and photos.) Depending upon the authority, there may be two other magnolias native the the Americas and there may be more than 200 species around the world. 

Eight to twelve creamy white petals curl over the center of the flower. 

The fruits are quite attractive to us and they also attract a variety of wildlife.

Sweetbay in the landscape

I transplanted two magnolias to the edge of this wooded area at about the same time. Several years later, they looked like this... 

I asked,"What's wrong with the magnolia on the right?"
The answer is "Nothing! It's a sweetbay losing its all its leaves in the spring."

There are several sweetbays in our North Florida yard, as far as I know, the previous owners who had built the house on a previously wooded lot about two years before we bought it in 2004, did not plant any of these trees, but they did plant two southern magnolias, which were probably the "little gem" cultivar even though there were several southern magnolias already growing wild on the property. One of the first gardening tasks we accomplished was to move those magnolias with their forever shedding leaves out of the front lawn and into the front meadow area. Here is the link to their story, but in hindsight, we should have left them there and replaced the lawn with native azaleas & blueberries, and other acid-loving shrubs, plus muhly grasses and ground covers instead.

But my topic here is the sweetbays with flowers and leaves about half as large as the southern magnolia. In my opinion, the scent of the sweetbay is stronger.

The sweetbay trees growing in drier areas of our yard tend to be large single stemmed trees with smooth gray bark and a trunk of 10 inches or more and about 60 feet tall. The trees growing in wetter areas tend to be smaller and produce many shoots around the central tree. With trees I've transplanted around the yard, this pattern holds no matter where they were moved from. From what I've read, the sweetbays in the more northerly part of their range tend to be small and shrubby.   

Sometimes, squirrels chew into the
branches and give the trees a trim.
In this photo you can also see how
silver the backs of the leaves are. 

The best characteristic in a managed landscape, though, is that they lose most of their leaves in the spring, so there's just one big drop. This is unlike the southern magnolia that drops its large, leathery leaves all year long.  

For more information on this wonderful Florida native and a link to Florida's native vendors that have it in stock, see its FNPS plant profile.

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt