Hi,
This Magnolia bloom suddenly just died off. Any ideas?
The link has pics of the tree from my journal and an attached pic to show you the bud on August 9th to August 11th:
http://davesgarden.com/journal/j/viewentry/60632/
I'll post another to show you the bud after I took it off the tree, opened it, and looked for bugs.
I tried loading pics of the bud I opened, but the pictures really stink. They're all fuzzy and such.
I'll try to take more pics of them in a little bit.
At any rate... do you see that small brown spot? That just kept getting larger and larger until the whole bud was brown and then just, well, died.
Here we go...
No bugs at all inside the bud.
Any thoughts?
This message was edited Aug 13, 2006 12:13 PM
Sometimes just really bad heat seems to turn magnolia buds to ash.
Scott
Yeah, I was contemplating what this could be also and kept coming back to heat and/or drought stress. My second thought was a fungus which might have been made bad enough to destroy the flower buds by heat and heat stress. Just my best 2 guesses though. The only time I've seen flower buds like that has been due to frost.
K-man, I think you've stumbled upon the answer. New Jersey is much closer to Greenland than you and Decrepit and I are. With the ice sheet melting up there in Greenland, and no doubt creating a major cold air drainage to the southwest, I bet a frost pocket is forming in New Jersey right on top of her magnolia!!!
. . . or else maybe it's heat or drought stress, but that's not very exciting, now is it?
Guy S.
I saw where it got down into the upper 30's in Maine and lower 40's in upstate New York the other night, so maybe you're onto something there Guy!
For as much as people complain about the heat of summer...I couldn't imagine living somewhere that could see the 30's or 40's in August! Send that cold air off the melting ice sheet away from Kansas! hehe
Actually I just saw on TV that back around 1000AD when Eric the Red landed on Greenland, the glaciers were much smaller than they are today even. They also said vineyards were common in areas of England and Scotland at that time, about 100 miles farther North than they can establish vineyards today. But I can't find any objective info to either discredit or corroborate this. Uh huh, did I just start another big discussion!? hehe
You guys crack me up....
Yeah, there was a lot of heat in the past weeks, brutal actually, although not particularly so while this bud was really starting to kick-in the growth.
I think it's probably the most likely scenario.
(sigh)
Btw, it was 64 degrees two nights ago 'round here and supposed to be back up to 88 today.
Rollercoaster.
