The Saucer Magnolia of the TU Schaugärten

The saucer magnolia was invented by a retired cavalry officer of Napoleon's army who had decided that growing things was a better use of a life than burning them. Etienne Soulange-Bodin crossed two Chinese magnolias at Fromont near Paris around 1820 and got a tree that flowered young, tolerated cold clay and opened its goblets before the leaves came out. Europe has been planting it ever since. Every saucer magnolia in Berlin descends from that idea. This one sits on Berlin's protected list as natural monument 6-77/B-2, the Tulpen-Magnolie, signed off on 2 March 1993. It stands on the western side of the old Koenigliche Gaertnerlehranstalt, the Prussian gardeners' school that ran here from 1903 to 1966 and whose grounds TU Berlin brought back as a teaching garden between 2012 and 2014. For ten days in April it is the loudest thing in the garden, and the protected conifers a hundred metres away are not in the conversation: pink and white flowers the size of a fist, hundreds of them, on bare grey branches. Then the leaves arrive and it goes back to being a broad, quiet, low-branching tree for another year. No planting date has ever been recorded for this individual, and nobody has published a girth.