It is doubtful if any American tree surpasses it as an ornament when its leaves, trunk, flowers, and bark are considered. It is not perfect in all of these particulars; in fact, it possesses some serious faults. The crown is often too small for the tree’s height; the branches straggle, many on some parts of the trunk and few on others; the flowers are objectionable because of strong odor which is unpleasant to most people. But these shortcomings are more than compensated for by splendid qualities. The rich, dark green of the leaves, their size and profusion, their changeless luster, place them in a position almost beyond the reach of rivalry from any other tree. Those who see this splendid inhabitant of the forest only where it has been planted in northern states, and elsewhere outside of its natural range, miss much of the best it has to give. It belongs in the South. The wet lands, the small elevations in deep swamps, the flat country where forests are dense, are its home. The yellowish-green trunk rises through the tangled foliage that keeps near the ground, and towers fifty feet above, and there spreads in a crown of green so deep that it is almost black. It likes company, and seldom grows solitary. Its associates are the southern maples, red gum, tupelo, cypress, a dozen species of oak, and occasionally pines on nearby higher ground. Festoons of grayish-green Spanish moss often add to the tropical character of the scene. The moss seldom hangs on the magnolia, but is frequently abundant on surrounding trees. Lumbermen formerly left the evergreen magnolia trees on tracts from which they cut nearly everything else. Large areas which had once been regarded as swamps were thus converted into parks of giant magnolias, many of which towered seventy or eighty feet. The tracts were left wild, and those who so left them had no purpose of providing ornament, but they did so. Many a scene was made grand by its magnolias, after other forest growth had been cut away. The range of evergreen magnolia is from North Carolina to Florida and west to Arkansas and Texas. The species reaches largest size in the vicinity of the Mississippi, both east and west of it. Trees eighty feet high and four feet in diameter occur, and trunks are often without limbs one-half or two-thirds their length, when they grow in forests. The common name for the tree in most parts of its range is simply magnolia, though that name fails to distinguish it from several other species, some of which are associated with it. Occasionally it is called big laurel, great laurel magnolia, laurel-leaved magnolia, laurel, and laurel bay. Bull bay is a common name for it in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It is called bat tree, but the reason for such a name is not known. Leaves are from five to eight inches long and two or three wide, and dark green above, but lighter below. They fall in the spring after remaining on the branches two whole years.