Tree following, after the flowers

It is time for another post about the tree I am following this year, my lovely Magnolia soulangeana 'Heaven Scent'. Last month was the first post I wrote about my tree and I described how I came about ending up with a tree like that in my tiny garden.

The decision to find a single stemmed magnolia that I could grow in a container has really paid off, even though it took a long time to find a nursery who had one for sale. 

The magnolia is placed here on my patio at the back among the large containers, nicely sheltered against wind in at least two directions and with sun only from 1 pm at this time of year. Perfect for a magnolia. This photo was taken about a week ago when there were still a few flowers left at the top.

And here it is today, no flowers but the leaves are already coming out.

The magnolia is also nicely sheltered against the sun in the summer by all the large containers in front of it, preventing the roots being ‘cooked’ in the summer heat.

And though the flowers are all gone, let me just remind you how it was – so brief but oh, so spectacular.

One of the parent species of this magnolia is the Magnolia liliiflora, also called the tulip magnolia. You can see that the offspring has inherited some of the same flower shape....

....although when the flowers are fully opened....

.....they earn their own name, saucer magnolia perfectly, shaped like a cup-and-saucer.

Today all there is left are a few petals from the last flowers and a whole year left to wait until next time it will flower.

The leaves are popping out, at the moment they are quite small but will become rather big

But I am left with these quite interesting pods or cones or....not sure what they are officially called, and I am not sure whether to leave them or remove them. Some tips from my visitors would be great here. They will of course take unnecessary nutrition  from the magnolia and I don’t need them, I am certainly not growing any more magnolias – on the other hand, most of them are too far up to be reached so I could not comfortably remove more than perhaps half of them anyway. I assume it is just fine to leave them on, after all, most magnolias are tall trees and I don’t think people climb ladders to remove the cones after flowering, but mine is growing in a container so perhaps I should give it a bit special treatment when it comes to this too? Any advice would be great :-)

I visited quite a few blogs last month that also had posts about following a tree, and I saw that some people struggled to measure or judge how tall their tree was. I thought I would explain a really easy way to measure the height of a tree that anyone can do, I learned it as a child by my grandfather and I have used this method many times.

First you need a tall tree. My magnolia is not exactly tall yet so let’s use my cedar tree at the bottom of my garden. This tree is rarely appearing on any photos on my blog, simply because it is too tall so usually all you can see is just the trunk. When I moved in here 12 years ago the tree had branches all the way to the ground but the first few years I chopped off a lot of them to make room for planting underneath. And since then the tree has grown. A lot. Now it looks more like a palm tree but it serves many purposes and I certainly wouldn’t get rid of it. Anyway. Tall tree. Checked.

And then you need a folding ruler or folding yardstick, a piece of ribbon and a short stick, for example a piece of bamboo.

Place the folding ruler up against the tree. If it stays there then just leave it, but this was a rather windy day and it took me 8 attempts just to get this photo as the ruler kept blowing down so I decided to go for option two....

....which is to tie a ribbon around the tree at the same height as your ruler. Mine is 2m long, it doesn’t really matter how long it is as long as you know the length. And you don’t have to use a folding ruler either, you could for example just place a ladder up against the tree or something else, but you need to know the height of it as I will show you later on, and it would be nice if the height is easily multipliable – unless you also include a calculator to your list of tools.

The next step is a bit difficult to show you on a photo, you will just have to trust me on this, it works. It’s just that a camera isn’t working the same way as our eyes are so I can’t make a photo that will show what you will see if you do this yourself. But what I am trying to show here is that you should step back so you can see the whole tree on a distance and so far away that the little bamboo stick or whatever you are using, is the same height as the height from the ground and up to the ribbon. If you have found a perfect place to stand and the stick is too long, just cut it a bit. Move yourself a bit forward or backward to get it precise. If you are very far away you can use a match stick, but for me to get at the right distance to use a match stick I would probably need to stand somewhere in my front garden, on the other side of my house as my garden is very small :-) The stick should be exactly the same height as the trunk is from the ground and up to the ribbon or whatever you have put there to indicate the height.

And then – sorry for my drawing skills, I am MUCH better at taking photos than drawing, but I hope you understand my scribbles – then you move the stick upwards as many times as the height of the tree until you get to the top. My first measurement where the ribbon is was 2m so each increment will be 2m, and easy to add up. This is why it was nice to have a 2m folding ruler and not a ladder that was 2.89m or something like that! So this shows that my cedar tree is 9m and a bit or about 30 feet tall. This way of measuring is only going to be approximate, and the taller the tree is, the more inaccurate it will be, but you will get a rough idea, and that’s what it is meant to give you.

I hope that explanation was OK, give it a try and you probably find it easy once you see it in practice. There are lots of other methods to measure the height of a tree, some require very few tools if any at all, some require very expensive tools. Here is a short list:

• Goniometry
• Using an inclinometer
• climbing to the top of the tree and doing a direct tape drop
• Using laser based range finder
• The shadow method

I am sure my visitors can come up with many more ways to measure tall things like trees, but my way is an easy way that doesn’t require deep pockets or university level math.

I am linking today’s post with Lucy at Loose and Leafy who’s hosting the ‘Tree following’ meme. If you head over to her blog you can see a lot of other trees of all sorts and shapes. Next month my magnolia will have lots of leaves and I will take some really close-ups and I also plan to introduce you to my second Magnolia soulangeana called 'Red Lucky' – also a container grown. Until next time, take care.