Magnolias are beautiful, very decorative trees - but they also cost a lot of money in specialist shops. If you or your neighbors or friends have a particularly beautiful specimen in your garden, you can grow such a tree yourself with its help (and a lot of patience). The three following methods are particularly suitable for this.
How can I grow a magnolia myself?
To grow a magnolia yourself, you can stratify seeds and then plant them, use cutters from suitable shoots or apply moss removal by scoring and covering a young shoot with moss. Each method requires patience and care.
Growing magnolia from seeds
Sometimes, after flowering, magnolias produce fruits that contain seeds inside. You can harvest the ripe seeds and grow a young magnolia from them. However, the prerequisite is that the seeds are first stratified for a few months, i.e. H. Stored airtight in moist sand in the refrigerator. Magnolias are cold or frost germinators and therefore cannot be planted immediately.
Propagation by reducers
However, growing a young plant using planters is relatively easy (and more promising than propagation from seeds). To do this, select one or more suitable shoots in July / August, which are tilted towards the ground and buried there in the soil. The shoot remains on the mother plant until root formation is complete. However, you need a lot of patience for this method: it takes at least one to one and a half years until the branch can be separated and planted as an independent plant.
Propagate magnolia by mossing
Removing moss works particularly well on magnolias. To do this, select a young shoot that is no more than one centimeter thick and cut it into the bark about 20 to 30 centimeters below the tip with a sharp and clean knife. Hold the cut open with a piece of plastic (€13.00 on Amazon) or wood and wrap it tightly with moist moss. Place a translucent, perforated plastic bag over it and tie it tightly at the ends. If you keep the moss moist, the first roots will develop after about two to three months.
Tips & Tricks
Most trees are usually propagated via cuttings. Unfortunately, experience has shown that this otherwise successful method works very poorly with magnolias - the cuttings become moldy rather than forming roots.