The Southern Magnolia

At the Bellamy Museum we are stewards of historic buildings and the stories told through them. The site wouldn't be the same, however, without the gardens around them. According to Ellen Bellamy's late 1930s memoir, Back with the Tide, the fenced gardens were laid out around 1870 in a French 'parterre' style. Parterre translates as 'on the ground' and, in landscape design, refers to formally laid out gardens of flowerbeds with symmetrical patterns of paths, hedges, and plantings. They are usually meant to be viewed from the elevation of a building's porch or upper windows.

The grand parterre gardens at Versailles

At the Bellamy Museum, the modestly-sized gardens that surround the main house feature five heritage trees likely from that original planting and design. They are Magnolia grandiflora, commonly known as the Southern magnolia, a tree symbolically rich and biologically ancient. Native to the southeastern United States and found as far west as Texas, this evergreen species belongs to one of the most primitive families of flowering plants, the Magnoliaceae. With a lineage over 95 million years, magnolias evolved before bees existed, relying instead on beetles for pollination. The grandiflora varietal was one of the many species first described by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1759 and the genus name honors French botanist Pierre Magnol. It typically grows to 60 to 80 feet tall with a pyramidal to rounded crown, a spread of 20 to 40 feet wide, and a trunk diameter of 3 feet. Grandiflora is derived from the Latin grandis (big), and flor (flower). 

 There are numerous types of magnolia and a sixth tree in our gardens is actually a dwarf varietal called 'Little Gem'. The grandiflora's glossy leaves, large white flowers, and dense oval seed pods distinguish it as both a botanical relic and an icon of the South. They begin to bloom in this area in late April and early May. In Southern U.S. culture, the magnolia is woven into the region’s identity. The magnolia's lush, highly fragrant, blossoms often evoke a romanticized South, appearing in literature, art, and music as emblems of longevity and tradition. Yet, the tree also exists in complex proximity to histories of slavery, segregation, and the rise of plantation culture.

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In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the presence of this tree sets a scene of beauty and tension, “The night was still. I could hear his heavy breathing, and I could smell the heavy sweetness of the magnolia blossoms.” William Faulkner's novels, often set in Mississippi, bring more beauty but often with elements of decay. Flora often sets a scene, such as, “The air was full of the smell of honeysuckle and magnolia and sweet shrub” in The Sound and the Fury. His 1841 essay, The Magnolia at Lake Pontchartrain, is direct, "Nothing at the south had affected me like the Magnolia ... I stood astonished as might a lover of music." In Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, the blooms become a metaphor, “The magnolia’s white flowers were like ghosts of summer in the tree.” For Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, it's a reflection on femininity and resilience, “She was a wind on the ocean. She had come back with the sun and the magnolia trees.”
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Magnolia grandiflora have also been linked to the interesting idea of witness trees — living trees that have stood through significant historical events. The White House grounds have a number of these. For example, the Andrew Jackson magnolia stood for nearly 200 years until it was removed for safety reasons on April 7, 2025. Another magnolia from a seedling replaced it the next day. Jackson is reputed to have planted the original in memory of his late wife, Rachel, and the tree appears on the back of the $20 bill. 

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Our area features bald cypress on the Black River that are thousands of years old. The spectacular live oak at Airlie Gardens is 500 years old. At the Bellamy site, our magnolias are over 150, a venerable age for the species. They feature in Wilmington's Heritage Tree program and receive much love and care at the museum.

Many trees have silently borne witness to moments of national significance and remain in place. A black walnut stands on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a white oak in Arlington National Cemetery, an American elm survived the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and is now part of a national memorial. At this museum, the magnolias will have been there for Wilmington's short-lived progress in Reconstruction, the accomplishments in World War Two, the 1960s downturn and the post-1990s growth. They saw the arming of a mob 100 yards away on November 10th, 1898 that denoted a racial massacre, part of the only successful coup in American history. The trees were there for the march from Williston school to the County courthouse on April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. He should have been speaking at Williston at the time of his death. They would have reflected the firelight on March 13, 1972, when an arsonist set a blaze in the Bellamy house for reasons we still don't know.

Trees can serve not only as biological survivors but as living testaments to history. A witness tree, by simply enduring, becomes a symbol of continuity, memory, and resilience. They can be fixtures of natural beauty and quiet observers.

Trees on the $20

The current Mississippi flag features a magnolia blossom