#franklinia

Plant of the Day

Tuesday 10 October 2017

This rare deciduous small tree or large shrub, Franklinia alatamaha (Franklin tree) can sadly no longer be found in the wild. It is the only species in this (monotypic) genus with dark green, glossy leaves that turn bright crimson in the autumn while the fragrant white flowers appear. It has been described as “challenging to grow” needing a rich, moist, well-drained soil in full sun to part shade and disliking root disturbance or drought once established. This beautiful plant was flowering at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley, Surrey, UK, where I was fortunate to be meeting the new group of Master of Horticulture (MHort) students and the second years.

Excerpt from this story (book review) from Inside Climate News:

In a quiet corner of the oldest botanic garden in North America grows a tree with long, graceful branches and leaves that curl like rust-colored tongues. When it’s blooming, the tree’s snow-white flowers are said to smell like honeysuckle, but at the end of November, its branches are bare, and its leaves are mostly heaped on the ground, a browning pile on the edge of the lawn.

Though it looks unassuming in winter, the tree has a prominent place on the maps of the garden where it’s cared for, Bartram’s Garden, on a stretch of land in Philadelphia hemmed in by the city on three sides and the Schuylkill River on the fourth. At the base of the trunk sits a placard with its name: Franklinia alatamaha, a species of tea tree that has been extinct in the sandy southern swamplands it came from for more than a century.

The elusive Franklinia appears in the writer Annie Proulx’s new book “Fen, Bog & Swamp,” one more unique treasure in a litany of treasures that Proulx uncovers in the world’s wetlands, past and present. Proulx writes about the father and son botanists John and William Bartram, who found a grove of Franklinia growing along the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia in 1765.

The Bartrams named the tree for Benjamin Franklin and carried its seeds back to Pennsylvania, where they cultivated the plant. All of the Franklinia trees that still exist are believed to be descendants of those original seeds; in a way, the Franklinia trees in Bartram’s Garden are wetland refugees, transplanted from their shrinking, warming natural habitat to the North, where curator Joel Fry told me the caretakers mimic the Altamaha’s acidic soil by spreading pine needles around the roots.

In William Bartram’s 18th-century work, which detailed his travels through the swamps and forests of the American Southeast, Proulx writes that we can experience “a wild tropical south we can know only through his words and drawings.”