The Cucumber Magnolia of Park Oliwski

Most people picture a magnolia as a garden shrub holding up pink goblets in April. This one is 19 metres tall with a trunk 271 centimetres round. Magnolia acuminata is a forest tree from eastern North America, and it is called the cucumber tree for its unripe fruit, a knobbly green cylinder a few centimetres long that reddens through late summer. Its flowers are the anticlimax of the genus: greenish yellow, held high in the crown, easy to stand underneath and miss completely. What the species does instead is get big, and this specimen has done it a long way north of anywhere it grows wild. It went onto Poland's register of natural monuments on 15 March 1992 as number 837. A second cucumber tree, 212 centimetres round, stands about 250 metres away in the same park, and the survey of Gdansk's protected trees picks out the tree magnolias of Park Oliwski, the ones past two metres of girth, as one of the collection's standouts. For a species that is only ever planted here as an ornamental, that is a real distinction. Nobody has dated it. There is no planting record, and no growth rate published for the species at this latitude to work one out from. If you have found either, tell us.