An endangered species of magnolia that only grows in the Florida Panhandle has been named the 2017 plant of the year by the Garden Club of America.
The timing couldn’t be better for this rare Florida tree, says Gary Knox, professor of environmental horticulture with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
For the last three years, Knox and a team of researchers at the UF/IFAS North Florida Research and Education Center in Quincy have been studying the Ashe magnolia to try to figure out why it’s so rare and how it may be conserved.
