Magnolia, the state flower of Mississippi

How to recognize it

The magnolia is hard to miss. Its flowers are large, white and cup-shaped, up to about 8 inches across, with as many as 12 thick, waxy petals and a lemony fragrance. They grow one at a time at the tips of the branches, set against evergreen leaves 5 to 8 inches long that are leathery and glossy dark green on top and covered with rusty fuzz underneath.

The main bloom runs from April to June, and a few flowers can keep appearing through the summer and occasionally into fall. Each flower then becomes a cone-like seed pod that opens in fall to show bright red seeds hanging on thin threads.

The tree

The flower and the tree are the same species, Magnolia grandiflora, the southern or evergreen magnolia. It is a medium-sized evergreen with a dense, pyramid-shaped crown that typically grows 60 to 80 feet tall on good sites, and its bark is thin and gray to brown. Squirrels, opossums, quail, wild turkeys and songbirds, including Mississippi’s state bird, the mockingbird, eat its seeds. The Choctaw made a tea from the bark to use as a wash for itching and sores.

Where it grows

The southern magnolia is native to the Coastal Plain of the Southeast, from eastern North Carolina to central Florida and west to southeast Texas, and the Forest Service says it is most common in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In the wild it covers roughly the southern half of Mississippi, growing on rich, moist, well-drained bottomlands and low slopes, but it has been planted all over the state.

Where to see it

Magnolias grow in yards, on campuses and around town squares across Mississippi, and the bloom can be seen in every corner of the state from late spring into early summer. The Mississippi State University campus in Starkville has a tree trail that features the species.

Chosen by schoolchildren

Mississippi’s children picked the magnolia long before the Legislature did. In a November 1900 election, 23,278 schoolchildren voted for a state flower. The magnolia won with 12,745 votes, far ahead of the cotton blossom with 4,171 and the cape jasmine with 2,484. In 1935 the state’s director of forestry began a second campaign, asking children to choose a state tree from the magnolia, the oak, the pine and the dogwood, and the magnolia won again. The Legislature named it the state tree on April 1, 1938, but did not make the bloom the state flower until 1952.

Since 2021 a white magnolia blossom has been the centerpiece of the state flag, where it stands for hope and rebirth because the magnolia often blooms more than once over a long season. Mississippi also has a separate state wildflower, coreopsis, adopted in 1991.