how big at planting ..

is it in full sun ...

how did you plant it??

ken

There is often an age or maturity factor involved with getting magnolias to bloom. I am not all that familiar with this species but some need to be 10-15 years old before flowering.

This particular species is likely to have been raised from seed. In which case you will simply be waiting for it to get old enough to flower. Seedlings of large growing magnolias may take many years to reach flowering age (or stage) - unlike grafted or cutting raised specimens, made using scions or cuttings which retain the sexual maturity of propagation material source plants. Also relatively smaller growing, shrubbier kinds bloom sooner than tall growing ones such as this. So if you are comparing with popular types like Star Magnolia, Lily Magnolia (or its many different garden hybrids such as Saucer Magnolia) then it's basically apples and oranges - flowering in garden center sizes will be one of the characters that makes these popular.

Two (if both are still present) Ho-no-ki on Azalea Way in the Seattle arboretum can be smelled in flower during suitable weather conditions well before the trees are come upon. So you may feel later it was well worth the wait - although the fragrance is a bit medicinal.

Elsewhere in the collection one of these was approaching 60 ft. tall about 12 years ago. Another example, in England measured 23 m (about 76 ft.) in 2010.

Look at the trunk and branches on this one:

http://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=fb0mVA8E&id=916F05D99AD2C016381B91C84D24E8176F0A3953&q=magnolia+obovata&simid=608020873438102158&selectedIndex=12&ajaxhist=0

Wow! That tree is pretty huge, isn't it?! I guess I need to be patient. Thank you for all the information. I live down in Grays Harbor County and don't get up to Seattle much anymore.

You are welcome. If you are planning on planting any other magnolias etc. and are not already familiar you might be interested in the soon-to-be-enhanced web site of Gossler Farms in Oregon.

Also forest farm, which uses their site to show photos of the plants they have in stock. So when a particular item is a magnolia that blooms small they will often actually have a picture of the flowers on the same material they are offering at the time.

I bought five magnolias in 2015 from Klehm's, and I have one--my favorite, Caehry's Belle, from Gossler. Also a yellow from the rhododendron nursery on the Hood Canal, the name of which I am blocking on.

I also bought one from the now-closed Greer Gardens. A year after I bought it, I was visited by a cop from USDA, because Greer was selling plants across states after he had been shut down because sudden-oak death was found on his nursery. He sold them from another nursery, but was found out. Life in the fast lane when it comes to trees, huh?

Do you grow a lot of magnolias?

"Also a yellow from the rhododendron nursery on the Hood Canal, the name of which I am blocking on."

Whitney Gardens?

Yep, that's it. Mom must be 100 now, don't you think?

In later years 'Caerhays Belle' has become a conspicuous seasonal draw near Azalea Way in the Seattle Arboretum. Before that Gossler used to maintain a waiting list for all the people that wanted this cultivar.

The nursery is Whitney Gardens near Brinnon. There are are few to several trees of various kinds there listed by Van Pelt, Champion Trees of Washington State (1996, University of Washington, Seattle) because I went and uncovered them, thinking based on previous visits that the site might have such potential.

The stock Harold brokered might not have been present on the Greer Gardens site longer than it took to receive them, box them and send them. Of course, part of the problem is that the S.O.D. organism spreads through the air as well as by the more conventional mode of infested puddles and streams. These days it is widespread, with some years ago an authority on the subject telling me the cat was long since out of the bag. So it may be possible that most operations will have or have already been visited by it, with certain ones being driven out of business as an unfortunate outcome of ultimately futile (and therefore Draconian) containment attempts.

The most recent story involving this pest I've heard is one where the runoff from an infested growing operation contaminated a stream, resulting in salal growing along the waterway becoming affected.

That is an example of how this pathogen gets around - it came out of the stream and up onto the leaves of the salal.

I used to belong to the Magnolia Society, organized their Annual Meeting in Seattle in 1980 - but I have not been involved for many years now. Off the top of my head I am only growing a single kind here at the moment (M. laevifolia 'Inspiration').