Magnolia virginiana australis 'Woodlanders Evangeline'

'Woodlanders Evangeline' is our own selection of the southern, evergreen sweetbay magnolia, Magnolia virginiana var. australis, chosen for the qualities that make a sweetbay worth growing: glossy evergreen foliage, a shapely habit, and the clean, lemon-sweet fragrance for which the species is loved. Sweetbay is native across the moist ground of the eastern United States, and in the South grows into a graceful evergreen tree rather than the shrubby, deciduous plant of the North.

Every sweetbay carries the same quiet charms. The leaves are deep green above and a soft silvery white beneath, so the whole crown shimmers when a breeze turns them, and the creamy, cupped flowers open a few at a time over a long summer season, scenting the warm air with lemon. The species name virginiana simply means of Virginia, from the colony where the tree was first described, and the genus Magnolia honors Pierre Magnol, the seventeenth-century French botanist of Montpellier.

Few native trees are so generous to wildlife. Sweetbay is one of the very few magnolias that thrive in wet, boggy ground, which makes the tree invaluable for damp and difficult sites, and the summer flowers draw pollinators while the foliage feeds the caterpillars of the eastern tiger swallowtail and the sweetbay silkmoth. Bright red seeds follow in fall for the birds.

Plant 'Woodlanders Evangeline' where an evergreen native is wanted in moist ground: a pond or stream edge, a rain garden, a moist border, or the woodland edge, and site the tree near a walk or window where the fragrance carries. Give moist, acidic soil in sun to part shade, and the tree asks little in return. As a Woodlanders selection of the evergreen southern sweetbay, this is a graceful, fragrant, wildlife-friendly native for the Southern and mid-Atlantic garden.