# Grandiflora, on Vegetal Aesthetics What does it mean to see a tree not just as a plant, but as a bearer of memory, labor, and loss? Following the life of a magnolia, Brandon Scott explores the tree's history and relationships as a site of vegetal aesthetics. February 04, 2026 By Brandon O. Scott | Edited by Russell C. Powell The windows, once spotless, sag vacant. The porch, once blue, sinks gray. All around the yard, plants trespass upon the house just as they trespass upon each other— knotweed holds the doorstep while mulberry saplings, ivy, and poison ivy festoon the tree, a southern magnolia, *Magnolia grandiflora*, whose branches swell forward, across, and backwards, clamoring onto the roof. Some time ago, when this house was still the home of my great-grandmother, her daughter, my grandmother, would lift me to smell the tree’s flowers. As I grew, so did my relationship to the tree. I raked its clacking leaves, climbed into it, and catapulted its fuzzy cones with my friend J., each filled with seeds the shade of blood. Even now, when I go home, I visit the magnolia which has outlived my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and the house they made on Greenwood Street. When I think about where our family comes from, it is from this tree. ![Magnolia tree](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-01/Scott1.jpg?itok=AvtYkqFS) Magnolia Tree, author's photoEvery plant, whether tree, shrub, forb, vine, or blade of grass, contains a possible beauty that germinates with sensory awareness, grows with attention, and flowers with memory. Given their size and duration, trees often enact this process more so than other plants. Consider another *Magnolia grandiflora*, not the one I grew up with, but one further away in time and place. It was seen by an anonymous writer whose essay, “Vegetation about Salem Massachusetts,” is included in Elizabeth Peabody’s edited volume *Aesthetic Papers* (1849), a collection of works written by New England Transcendentalists, including Emerson and Thoreau. *M. grandiflora* is a southern tree, but the writer knows of a place “where grow some plants that are not common to these northern regions.” There “is found the Magnolia, with its unrivaled foliage, saturating the air for miles with the odor of its flowers.” Sight and smell start a study of the tree that crosses sense with sentiment: The pencil can give but a faint idea of the splendor of the Magnolia grandiflora; and the pen altogether fails in the effort to describe its charms. The South may well be proud of the possession of a tree of such noble bearing. The leaves are glossy, and of a most luxuriant softness. The young branches are of a fine, purplish brown, producing flowers at the extremity of each; and, when the tree rises to the height of seventy feet, and each branch holds up its petalled vase of ivory whiteness, as if presenting incense to the sun, it affords an appearance of beauty and grandeur that rivals the proudest production of man. Many of the nations of the earth have chosen a flower for their emblem…If ever these United States should choose a symbol from the vegetable world, let that be the magnolia![\[1\]](#_ftn1) Initially, the description “fails” magnolia’s beauty, as if human craft is too wooden to pace nature’s vigor. Yet as the author’s words come to center on magnolia’s flower—“petalled vase”—art and nature entwine into a complex relationship as sensory qualities—shape, scent, soaring heights, softness—conjure a sense of place beyond the magnolia itself, expanding into regional praise (the South) that dilates into national pride. While the thought of Northern Transcendentalists usually found little reception among Southern audiences, under *M. grandiflora,* they could agree. The year before the *Aesthetic Papers* was issued, the *Southern Literary Messenger* published an essay simply titled “Trees.” The unlisted author felt verse better oriented one towards magnolias than prose: > Seest thou the heavenward head, > > Of yon magnolia with its ample boughs > > And its pure blossoms? Say— dost thou inhale > > Its breathing fragrance?” While the first question asks that we direct sight to the tree’s distant branches, the second asks us to breathe magnolia in, bringing its scent into ourselves. Distance and intimacy continue to alternate as poetic prelude lengthens into prosaic description: It is a child of the sunny South…To its shade the tawny son of the wilderness used to repair, and gather from its roots relief for fevers: and while he pointed it out as the cynosure of the forest in point of perfection of form and beauty, he extracted from it a medicine that gave health and vigor to his frame. These lines imply that looking at and breathing in magnolia are traditions inherited from unspecified Native Americans who first knew the tree, as if the interplay of sensorial distance and intimacy that the tree stimulates also prompts an interplay of historical distance and intimacy. With such evocative potential, magnolia rouses a stream of superlatives: > Of all the trees east of the Rocky Mountains, the large, flowered Magnolia is the most remarkable for the majesty of its appearance; it is the glory of the forest and has a place among the largest of trees, varying from sixty to one hundred feet in height. The head often forms a perfect cone, placed on a clear, straight trunk resembling a beautiful column, and from its dark green foliage, silvered over with milk white flowers is seen at a great distance.[\[2\]](#_ftn2) Description, metaphor, and botanical knowledge together constitute this high arboreal appraisal. While one approach alone could commend magnolia beauty, this pluralistic account extends praise into a method with magnolia as a “medicine” that gives “health and vigor” to aesthetic experience. Today, “aesthetics” is often a synonym for beauty in the judgmental and visual senses, but in the nineteenth century, “aesthetics” had wider concerns. Peabody, in the introduction to the *Aesthetic Papers*, stressed the term’s expansiveness. In “the Dictionary or Encyclopedia,” she says, we: > … might there find, that the word aesthetics implies a “philosophy of poetry and the fine arts”: but he that has used the word but twice perceives, that it is more than this; that, like carbon or oxygen, it is an element that encounters his inquiry in the most unexpected forms…The “aesthetic element,” then, is in our view neither a theory of the beautiful, nor a philosophy of art, but a component and indivisible part in all human creations. Aesthetic engagement is a way of reflecting upon and refining experience. Like breathing, it is always something we are doing, but its necessity does not mean it only works one way, that it cannot be improved by exercise and intention. And like breathing, too, aesthetic engagement is not something we do alone. What we inhale—literally and aesthetically—is often a gift from plants. The initial breath we draw from sense perception extends into questions, swells into inquiry that releases into forms of knowing and ways of remembering. This act of intermingling our experiences, sentiments, and knowledge of plants is what I call “vegetal aesthetics.” More than just a feel-good phytophilia, vegetal aesthetics involves prolonged intentional engagement, given the necessary role pluralistic forms of knowing play.[\[3\]](#_ftn3) It is not enough just to understand botany, to have green memories, or to be open to observing plant life. The pluralist aspect of vegetal aesthetics demands that something from each of these be integrated into a coherent account. The ground for vegetal aesthetics was prepared in the eighteenth century. Philosophies of taste cultivated a critical language for analyzing natural beauty; botanical theories of classification fostered rigorous practices of observation; colonial exploration produced new forms of knowledge about fruits, flowers, seeds, and leaves; and just about every artistic medium engaged some aspect of plant life. In the nineteenth century, vegetal aesthetics developed into distinct varieties across trans-Atlantic cultures, especially in the United States. Here, as local, regional, and national identities emerged, trees often revealed or denied desires for belonging. Magnolias contributed to the gracious character of the South, while elms did something similar in New England. Yet other trees embodied undesirable identities. Longleaf pine was associated with the grueling black labor of turpentining, while tree of heaven was slandered as a noxious, Asian invader. Regardless of desirability, however, was the general recognition that trees bore more than just their leaves in their branches, but also ideas of beauty, place, knowledge, and social character. Richard Upton Piper, in his popular mid-nineteenth century series *Trees of America* (1855-1858), summed up the vegetal aesthetics I’m describing with a fitting analogy: “As the leaves of trees are said to absorb all noxious qualities of the air, and to breathe forth a purer atmosphere, so it seems to me as if they drew from us all sordid and angry passions, and breathed forth peace and philanthropy.”[\[4\]](#_ftn4) For Piper the “aesthetic and moral influence of Trees” was as important as their use in “building and other purposes.” Concerns of beauty, morality, and utility made trees “a subject of national concern.”[\[5\]](#_ftn5) While this pluralistic way of intermingling persons and plants is desirable, it is not without complications. In an article for *American Forestry* in 1918, R. W. Shufeldt wrote, “From whatever angle we view the magnolias as a group, they are interesting and inspiring.” Though magnolia wood had “little use to man,” its beauty was a near-universal source for positive appreciation. *Near* because Shufeldt qualifies the community of those who can truly behold magnolia’s beauty: “… even a savage appreciates their beauty. But no such sentiment,” he says, “stirs the average negro of the Southern States” who, instead of appreciating magnolias from a distance, “hews the trees down in scores” to make Christmas wreathes from its leaves— “Through this vicious practice magnolias are now practically extinct in vast areas.”[\[6\]](#_ftn6) Blacks either lack the cognitive capacity or the education to see magnolias as living beings deserving regard, according to Shufeldt. In other words, Blacks lack vegetal aesthetics. But Shufeldt’s logic could be reversed; he seems only to understand magnolia through a politics of purity veiled as environmental concern. Instead, magnolia could be seen as a member of a highly relational landscape, its meaning in Southern society at once botanical, symbolic, and practical. To “hew the trees down in scores” in addition to providing a means to live may also have been a means for blacks of carving out a presence in a place that, decades after emancipation, constantly sought to fell, lop, axe, cleave, and “hew” black life out. ![Magnolia tree leaves and flower](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-01/Scott2.jpg) Magnolia leaves and flower, author's photoI wonder why my great-grandmother, Alvania Statton Doggett, planted the magnolia in front of the house she bought. I was three when she died at 101. Her mother, Hannah Joyner, was born into slavery in 1858, exactly where is unclear, though one of the largest plantations in the county at the time of her birth was named Magnolia. Was planting a magnolia my great-grandmother’s own vegetal aesthetic, her way of cultivating not just the South’s most beautiful tree, but also of confronting its most brutal tree? *“Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh/ Then the sudden smell of burning flesh”* is how Billie Holiday asks us to inhale magnolia beauty and brutality as she sings of “Strange Fruit,” a song of conflicted pluralism that the three generations of my family who lived through slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow had to experience and endure. While not fraught for me in their way, magnolia seeds splattered red on the ground were the first image to come to my mind when I learned my friend J. had been killed, shot through the neck. He always remained rooted, if not trapped, where we grew up. His obituary page, nearly a decade later, still offers the option to “Plant a tree” in his memory, though there is already one that holds his for me. If aesthetics is more than a “philosophy of fine arts and poetry,” so, too, vegetal aesthetics is more than a philosophy of flowers and shades of green. It is a practice of cultivating perceptions that can match plants’ botanical depth, their historical significance, and their culturally influenced beauty. Like understanding ourselves, no single approach proves proficient at the task, just as no multitude of approaches can complete it. The Greenwood Street magnolia will one day die, but the seedlings I planted from it will give shade and fragrance to those who come after to look and smell. **Brandon O. Scott** studies the history of landscape and aesthetics through plants. He is a doctoral student in the History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT completing his dissertation titled, "The American Grove: On 19th Century Vegetal Aesthetics." The project examines the ways in which the American elm (Ulmus americana) and longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) generated awareness of history, place, and futures among their respective northern and southern communities. An important part of this project is linking historic locations and trees to their present sites, exploring the possibility of a living archive where the past continues to grow. --- [\[1\]](#_ftnref1) Anonymous (“An English Resident”), “Vegetation About Salem,” in *Aesthetic Papers*, ed. Elizabeth P. Peabody (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1849), 244-245. [\[2\]](#_ftnref2) Anonymous, “Trees.”, *Southern Literary Messenger*, January 1848, 12-13. [\[3\]](#_ftnref3) My understanding of pluralism in this regard is indebted to Emily Brady. See: Emily Brady, “Pluralism” in *The Routledge Handbook of Nature and Environmental Aesthetics*, eds. by Glenn Parsons, Sandra Shapshay and Ned Hettinger (New York: Routledge), 138-149. [\[4\]](#_ftnref4) R. U. Piper. *Trees of America* (Boston: William White, 1858), 5. [\[5\]](#_ftnref5) These latter lines are a from a letter Piper sent to the editor. See: Editors, “Trees; Medical Topography; Shade; Sanitaria”, *The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal*, March 1857, 723. [\[6\]](#_ftnref6) R. W. Shufledt, “Studies of Leaf and Tree (Part II)”, *American Forestry*, February 1918, 95.