Magnolia cordata

Magnolia cordata is the yellow cucumbertree, a smaller, more garden-friendly cousin of the towering cucumbertree magnolia and, botanically, a variety of it, Magnolia acuminata var. subcordata. Where the parent species climbs seventy feet and hides greenish flowers high in the canopy, this yellow-flowered form stays a modest tree of twenty-five to thirty-five feet and carries the trait breeders have chased for generations: tulip-shaped blooms of clear, canary yellow.

The flowers open with the emerging foliage in late spring and early summer, small but sweetly fragrant and a true, unmuddied yellow, the very color that gave rise to the celebrated yellow magnolias. Cross this native with the Chinese yulan magnolia and you get 'Elizabeth', the most famous yellow hybrid of all, and much of the modern yellow-magnolia lineage traces back to trees like this one. The genus Magnolia honors Pierre Magnol, the seventeenth-century French botanist, and the epithet acuminata points to the tapered leaf tip shared with the parent species.

A North American native of the southeastern woods, the yellow cucumbertree makes a shapely, rounded small tree, slow and steady rather than rangy, with the clean green summer foliage and gold fall color of the clan. The later bloom is a quiet advantage in the garden: opening after the spring frosts have passed, the flowers rarely suffer the browning that catches the early saucer magnolias.

Give the yellow cucumbertree full sun to part shade and deep, rich, well-drained soil, and site the tree where the yellow flowers can be seen against a darker backdrop, since a clear yellow reads best with contrast. Modest in size and hardy, this is a magnolia for a medium garden, a lawn specimen, or a collector who wants the original wild source of the yellow magnolias rather than a named hybrid.