The Star Magnolia and the End of the Samurai
The Star Magnolia is native to one of the richest areas in all of Japan, Ise Bay. Ise Bay is on the largest island of the thousands of islands that make up the Japanese nation, Honshu. Ise Bay not only offers some to the richest rice patties in Japan (thanks to the Kiso river), but also is a center for pearl farming by the ocean and for fishing. When Japan started to become industrialized, Ise Bay also became one of Japan’s main manufacturing centers, a fact that the natural port at Ise greatly aided.
It is the events that lead to this industrialization that interest us when it comes to the Star Magnolia. The Star Magnolia—long before it took on this Western name—was one of the hidden treasures of Ise Bay. It still grows there, next to the boggy waterways and uncultivated mountain slopes. It grows to 20 feet in height and blooms with beautiful white flowers. For centuries, only the native population of Ise Bay ever laid eyes on this beautiful tree and its silky white flowers.
Today, however, you might also find this flowering tree in the West—in the American South for example, where it sometimes stands next to those other Magnolias that have become so associated with that region of the country that many may not know how many of them originated in the Far East. You might also find the Star Magnolia in England and Continental Europe. This type of Magnolia pops up in both America and Europe at about the same time—in the 1860’s in America and the 1870’s in England (and subsequently in Europe). In fact, if you look at the history of trees and plants originating in the Far East, you will find that many of them come to the West at this time. Why?
Commodore Perry and the Black Ships
The reason the Magnolia stellata (the Star Magnolia’s scientific name) and other similar horticultural species from the Far East start popping up at this moment in American history has everything to do with Commodore Perry and the desire of the United States to join in the empire building that characterized its European parent, England. The United States had tried in the past to open trade with Japan, but failed. When the United States was still a fledgling country, it had traded with Japan under Dutch flags. (Dutch ships were trapped in the struggles of the Napoleonic Wars). The U.S. had even attempted to return Japanese sailors shipwrecked in Washington in order to gain favor with Japan—but the Japanese Shoguns rebuffed them violently.
The Japanese nation during this period had a policy of “Sakoku” that restricted contact with the outside—allowing only limited trade with the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki. In the 1850’s, Commodore Perry, on a mission for the U.S. government, dropped anchor outside of the Japanese capitol, Edo (modern day Tokyo) and gave the Japanese the choice of either opening to western trade or being bombarded. The Shogunate, knowing they were outmatched, agreed to American terms and consequently lost their hold over Japan in the anarchic period that followed. The new rulers outlawed the Samurai and Japan started to become industrialized.
Ise Bay
For the long hidden Magnolia stellata, this meant a new home across the world. What westerner it was that eyed the beautiful flowering tree and carried its seeds back to the American South in those years just after the American Civil War, the winds of history have scattered his or her name to the winds. Probably, packed next to pearls or other finery, the stellata’s seeds came to some Southern plantation owner in search of an exotic tree to grow on his lands and then spread across the south from there.
The European who introduced the Magnolia stellata to the continent might be clearer. Most people believe it was Charles Maries, a famous botanist who collected many a Far Eastern growth for the famous Victorian Veitch nurseries (the largest nurseries in all of Europe during the 19th century). Maries explored Japan in 1870’s after the Boshin Civil War had ended and Japan had stabilized.
One of the ironies of history of course, is that Japan’s forced industrialization is one of the central reasons that Japan would turn from being inward looking into being an aggressively outward looking military power of the kind that could feel itself prepared to attack its Western interlopers at Pearl Harbor.