Dr. Alexander Garden & the Southern Magnolia
One of the stars of Southern summers is the Southern Magnolia, which we hope you’ve had the opportunity to sniff! These evergreen trees grow quite large, and sport distinctive glossy green leaves. But they’re probably best known for their flowers: massive blossoms of creamy white petals, with a spicy-sweet scent that carries on the sticky summer air. You’ll spot them blooming in May and June, then see their leaves wound into trailing garlands for distinctive Charleston Christmas decorations. The species is ancient, found to have changed relatively little in the last 20 million years, and in fact are pollinated by beetles, which predate bees by about 30 million years!
Dr. Alexander Garden (1730-1791) called the Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) “the finest and most superb evergreen tree that the earth produced.” Garden lived and worked at the Dr. Henry Frost Surgery at 98 Broad St, which is currently the location for a French café called Gaulart et Maliclet. The restaurant has been in operation since 1984, and is popularly known as “Fast and French.” Dr. Garden practiced medicine in Charleston for almost 30 years. In 1760, he and his fellow Charleston physicians inoculated over 2,000 people against smallpox. In addition to his work as a physician, Garden was very knowledgeable of plants and their properties, so the Southern magnolia’s rating among the evergreens came from a tough critic. Much of Garden’s correspondence that was related to plants was with John Bartram, about whom we’ve written before. Like Bartram, Garden supplied Carl Linnaeus and other European scientists with a large number of plant specimens for their collections. Garden remained a Tory after the Revolutionary War, and had little choice but to leave Charleston in 1782 and return to England, finding his views quite unwelcome in the newly independent nation.
You can learn more about Charleston’s natural history on our walking tour with naturalist Layton Register, and discover the plants, animals, botanists, and agriculturalists who have shaped Charleston’s landscape.
