The Planetarium Magnolias

These two magnolias spent two years parked in a landscape contractor's garden because he would not destroy them. In 1966 the province wanted the ground they stood on, outside the old Vancouver Court House downtown, for a new government fountain, and the pair was scheduled for disposal. The public objected loudly enough that the contractor hired to clear the site, K. Johnsen, moved the trees to his own property instead. In 1968 the Vancouver Park Board acquired them and replanted them in Vanier Park, flanking the two ramp entrances of what was then the H.R. MacMillan Planetarium and is now the Space Centre. The courthouse they were dug out of is today the Vancouver Art Gallery. They went in as young trees in 1912, which puts them a little past a century; that figure comes from the recorded planting date rather than from anything measured on the trunk. A saucer magnolia is a hybrid raised outside Paris in the 1820s and named for the man who made it, Soulange-Bodin, and it flowers the way that reputation suggests: in late March and April, before a leaf appears, both trees fill with pink and white goblets on bare grey wood. The rescue is set down in a 2006 Heritage Vancouver Society newsletter, the one detailed account of these trees we have found. The city register still lists them as a single line, and there are two of them, one at each ramp.