Mourning a Star Magnolia

And grieving the man who tried to save it.

The star magnolia bloomed in April.

Every year, its white blossoms declared the arrival of spring, unfurling the announcement in silky white petals that caught the sunlight, scattering it like a blessing on the barely-thawed ground. It assured us that winter had finally done its worst. While we never tempted fate by taking the ice scraper out of the car, we exchanged snow shovels for garden rakes and turned on the outdoor spigots. We even planted lettuce. The magnolia brought hope that we could thrive, just as it did, astonishing us every spring for the three decades it stood in front of our house.

I had the magnolia for thirty years; I had my husband for forty-three. I couldn’t save him. He couldn’t save the tree. We did what we could. The magnolia died first.

In 1986, we bought the one house we could afford in a St. Paul neighborhood we thought was beyond our reach. The house is a story in itself, but I’ll inventory the yard for you.

One sad sand cherry. Two thorny Russian olives. The blue spruce, cut down, was our Christmas tree that first winter. A flailing juniper. A single horse chestnut, limbs heavy with armored fruit in summer, knotted with ice in winter. Ferns, hiding the cracked foundation. What once was a lilac hedge, now an impenetrable tangle of outlaw species. A silver maple that would grow over the next thirty years to such dangerous heights that widowmaker — a bough that could crash through a roof, crush a car, or worse — made an uneasy entry into our conversations.

The house would be beautiful in the end, but costly. We started with the yard. After a few years that killed off the showy plants I couldn’t resist, I began to pay reluctant attention to soil and shade conditions, nutrients, pest control, hardiness. Zone 4, I’d repeat, Zone 4, as I pushed my cart past the perennials I knew were bound to break my heart. Then I’d come across butterfly bushes. Zone 5. This time, I’d tell myself, will be different. It was never different. I kept buying them anyway.

The yard, eventually, flourished. I wasn’t the best gardener. It made me happy to see things grow. Almost everything grew.

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As a stay-at-home mom of two young children, I would have gone mad if my husband hadn’t arrived home by four-thirty every day after work.

“See you,” I’d say, giving him a quick kiss before I ran out the door. I know I kissed him, but maybe not every time. My memories are etched with longing and hurt. The neighbor I’d met at six a.m. for intimate predawn walks before our husbands left for work had gone back to her full-time job. Her kids were in day care. She was a wage earner; I was a mom. My walks were now solitary, and never in the dark.

My new route took me along a paved trail along the Mississippi River. Runners, bicyclists, and pedestrians share a four-foot-wide strip of asphalt extending for miles. On one side of the path are riverbanks; on the other, a Sunday-drive parkway. Beyond that are mansions, fronted by long, landscaped yards. The lawns come right up the the curb. There are no sidewalks.

No sidewalks: that’s what wealth looks like.

“Feel better?” my husband always said when I sat at the bench by the back door, unlacing my Nikes. It didn’t occur to me that he might be exhausted, too. Sometimes I’d prepared dinner before I left — cashew chicken salad, or hamburgers ready for the grill — but often, I had not. We ate a lot of canned soup.

One brilliant afternoon after days of rain, I paused on the path to look at one of the houses whose residents I envied. It was a Prairie style, set back from the road, but not as far as the others. A small tree, roots wrapped in burlap, was blooming. Big white flowers like nothing I’d ever seen. I was in love.

A Bobcat and a backhoe sat next to it. Mountains of black dirt. I glanced both ways. No one. I was alone on the trail. The landscapers had gone home for the day. I dashed across the road and read the tag: Magnolia stellata. Star Magnolia. And — did I need an eye exam? — Zone 4. It could survive to 30 degrees below zero.

“You have to see it,” I said when I got home. “It’s just past the monument. I’ll take over.” I took the spatula and broke the hamburger in the frying pan into chunks. What were we having? A jar of Ragu on the counter, water about to boil on the rear burner: spaghetti with meat sauce.

An hour later, when he hadn’t returned, I set dinner in front of the kids. Another hour passed. I heard the minivan pull into the garage As he took off his jacket, I gave him the Where were you? look.

“I saved dinner,” I said. I saved dinner. No, I assembled it and stuck it in the fridge.

“Look on the back steps,” he said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

He’d gone to three garden centers before finding it at the boutique nursery off Summit Avenue. I didn’t ask what he paid. He could have stolen it off that lawn, for all I cared. Karma was going to get me in the end.

“I love you,” I said. I was unreasonably, ridiculously happy.

---

The magnolia grew.

I wish I had a time-lapse film, where twenty-five years happen in a minute. I want a single frame for every event from every year those white spokes woke me out of winter. Bicycles. Sprinklers. The house blue, then teal. Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Barbie dolls. Halloween costumes I labored over and those done at the last minute. Three master’s degrees and the degrees that preceded them. Our daughter awkward, then stunning. Boyfriends: bad, less bad, only one awful. Our son gangly, then handsome. His girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife. I want to watch it all happen as the magnolia grew, reaching above the roofline, stretching halfway across the front of the house. I want a replay of the astonishing things that happened when I was paying attention, and when I was not.

I can’t tell you exactly when I stopped paying attention, when the misery took over. I can say that he quietly began to do more of everything, as I did less. As I did, finally, almost nothing.

I can tell you that when I came back to life and looked around, and saw — really saw — my husband and children, I was unreasonably, ridiculously happy.

The magnolia grew.

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We both retired in 2021. When it warmed up, we ate dinner on the open front porch nearly every night. Through the foliage, we spied on our neighbors. A new dog. A baby. Voices raised, we strained to hear; lowered, we leaned in more closely. College students in the rental house two doors down: they moved in, they moved out, they played beer pong with Miller Lite. That didn’t change.

“What’s wrong with the magnolia?” I asked him one night.

Pale oval pockmarks, each a quarter of an inch long, covered the gray surface of the bark. The branches looked like a messy bunch of pussy willow. A sticky substance dripped from the leaves. An online search gave us the answer: magnolia scale. Our tree was infested with parasites, and dying.

He researched cures. There weren’t many. He didn’t want to harm the earth or its inhabitants. That, it seemed, was a challenge.

Neem oil, a natural, non-toxic pesticide, seemed like a good plan. According to some experts, it only worked at certain times of the year. Others argued for greater frequency. He went with the latter method, spraying daily. One morning I came out to see him standing on the second rung of a tall stepladder. I grabbed it to hold it still and maybe break his fall. The tree was more than twenty feet tall.

“No. This is not happening. You’re coming down, right now.”

Bad knees. Arthritis. Not following safety measures printed right there, that warning. Nothing is worth the risk. Don’t ever, ever, do that again.

He bought a bag of popsicle sticks at Michael’s and scraped the bark, everywhere he could reach. He placed strips of sticky paper on the leaves to trap the tiny nymphs when they emerged from the quarter-inch ovals, now identified as adult females. The leaves continued to shrivel.

We called the arborist who’d trimmed our maple twice.

“Oof. Scale disease. That hurts.” He shook his head. “I’ve had to take out a couple of hundred trees already. It’s all over the metro.”

The disappointment in my husband’s eyes. Knowing the answer, he asked the question anyway.

“Any other options?”

“Yes, but not a great one. I send a guy out, he digs a trench. Poisons the soil. I mean, really poisons it. It’s full hazmat gear, and no guarantees.”

We looked at each other. No. The next morning, he was at it again, scraping the bark with a popsicle stick.

The tree gave us a few — maybe a dozen — farewell blossoms the following spring. In May, we watched the PET scan image of his lungs bleed onto the screen, and heard the oncologist say, Stage 4. Terminal. He started chemo the following week. Later that summer, I heard the chainsaw. In April, 2023, he died. Three rounds of poisonings of his body had failed.

I felt I had failed as well. My efforts, such as they were — driving him to treatments, bringing the foods he asked for as his tastes changed, administering medications, trying to lift and steady him through his last days, an untrained caregiver in the house he’d so lovingly made a home — had only made things worse.

We were lucky enough to get him into a hospice. The people there were kind. He got the best care possible, at no cost. It gave us five more weeks to be a family.

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The Magnolia stellata in front of the Prairie style house bloomed again this year. So did several others along the parkway. I don’t know if the owners were lucky, or if they went the poison route. If they did, had it worked? It didn’t matter. The trees lived. I could still admire them.

Last winter was an easy one. The river had little ice to shed. Still, I think of all the years when it ran fast and dangerous. Remembering a incident from some time ago — a small boat, kids, a nearby dam — I make a point of pausing during my walks at a skinny sapling too close to the trail, vulnerable to bikes and strollers and careless runners. I pray for its survival.

Friends ask me if I plan to move. Out of the house, or the state. Somewhere south of here? I laugh. No. I know the drill. I’ve lived all of my life in Zone 4.

It’s not just the cold, or the snow, or the necessity of keeping an ice scraper in your car year-round because if you don’t, a blizzard will hit and you’ll carry that shame of that jinx for a lifetime. It’s knowing that if you plant a Zone 5 butterfly bush in that sunny yet protected corner next to the foundation, it will die. Still, you plant one every year. Every year, it dies. You live in Zone 4, and butterfly bushes do not. If you were smart, you’d move to Zone 5. But you don’t. For some reason, you stay. For as long as you can, you stay.

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