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Tony Harris has been pulling weeds from Georgia's history for most of his adult life. As vice president of the Georgia Cherokee Community Alliance, he tends a garden at Green Meadows Preserve in Cobb County where Cherokee medicinal and ceremonial plants grow in soil that Cherokee people cultivated for thousands of years before they were driven from it. The sweetbay magnolia is in that garden. The Cherokee rose is not.
Harris put the matter plainly in a letter to the Georgia Native Plant Society. The Cherokee rose, he wrote, has no historical significance to Cherokee culture. None. The flower was imported from China through the port of Savannah in the early 1800s, sold by nurserymen to wealthy landowners for hedging, and eventually given a name that linked it, falsely, to the people the state had expelled. Harris didn't mince words. He recommended that the legislature remove it as the state flower and replace it with a plant that Cherokee people actually knew—one that grew in the ground beneath their feet for millennia.
On March 10, the Georgia Senate passed Senate Bill 240 to do just that. If signed into law, the sweetbay magnolia will replace the Cherokee rose as the state's official floral emblem. The bill would also designate April as Native Plant Month. It passed with the kind of bipartisan ease that suggests everybody in the chamber already understood, at some level, that the old symbol was built on a lie.
The lie is layered, which is what makes it instructive. In 1916, the Georgia General Assembly designated the Cherokee rose as the state flower under the stated assumption that it was indigenous to Georgia and could be found growing in every county. Both claims were wrong. Rosa laevigata is native to southern China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. It was introduced to the Southeast during the colonial era and spread aggressively—so aggressively that the Georgia Invasive Species Council has since classified it as an invasive pest. Garden centers won't sell it. Landscape architects won't spec it. The state's own experts say it harms the ecosystems it colonizes.
Then there's the name. The legend that tied the flower to the Cherokee people—white petals for the mothers' tears, gold center for the stolen land, seven leaflets for the seven clans—was popularized many years after the Trail of Tears. It is a beautiful story, and it is not a Cherokee story. It is a story that non-Cherokee Georgians told themselves about a flower from Asia, and they told it so often and so well that it passed for fact for more than a century.
Representative Deborah Silcox, the Sandy Springs Republican who carried the bill in the House, put the history in two sentences. "The Cherokee Rose was adopted as the state flower in 1916 under the incorrect assumption that it was native to the state and also a legacy of the Cherokee people," she said. "It is neither."
The sweetbay magnolia is both.
Magnolia virginiana grows wild across Georgia's Coastal Plain and well beyond it—from the swampy lowlands of the coast to the Piedmont's stream banks, anywhere the soil stays wet and acidic. It is a slender, understory tree, rarely taller than thirty or forty feet in Georgia, with smooth gray bark and leaves that flash silver when the wind turns them. The flowers are small by magnolia standards—two or three inches across, creamy white, cup-shaped—and they smell like lemons and something older, something that belongs to the particular humidity of a June morning in a Georgia bottomland.
The tree has been here a long time. Long enough for the eastern tiger swallowtail—Georgia's state butterfly—to evolve a dependency on it. The swallowtail lays its eggs on sweetbay leaves. The caterpillars eat the leaves. Without the tree, the butterfly cannot complete its life cycle. This is not a casual relationship. It is the kind of bond that takes thousands of years to build, the slow braiding of two species into one system.
Michael Cowan, board chair of the Georgia Native Plant Society, framed the ecological argument in terms that carried an economic edge. Georgia is home to nearly thirty-six hundred native plant species, he pointed out, and those plants are the foundation of ecosystems that support the state's agricultural economy—its largest industry. Invasive
species, including the Cherokee rose, cost the American economy an estimated hundred billion dollars a year. In agriculture and forestry alone, invasive plants reduce crop yields by an estimated twelve percent nationally. A state flower you can't plant, that harms the land it grows on, is a state flower at war with its own economy.
Stuart Cofer, who runs Cofer's Home & Garden Showplace in Athens, made the consumer case. He said it would be good to have a state flower that Georgians could actually buy from local nurseries and plant on their own land. The sweetbay magnolia is widely available. It grows in all regions of the state. It doesn't spread where it isn't wanted.
The bill's formal name is the Caroline Romberg Silcox Act. The Georgia Cherokee Community Alliance supports it. The Georgia Council for American Indian Concerns supports it. The American Society of Landscape Architects' Georgia chapter supports it. The bill still needs the governor's signature.
There is something clarifying about what the legislature is trying to do. Not redemptive—a flower doesn't fix history. But clarifying. For a hundred and ten years, Georgia honored a plant from China with a name borrowed from the people the state removed. The myth was comfortable. It allowed the state to gesture toward Cherokee memory without reckoning with Cherokee loss, to adopt an emblem that sounded like atonement but was actually another act of appropriation—taking their name for a flower that was never theirs.
The sweetbay magnolia doesn't carry that weight. It carries a different one. It is a tree that has always been here, growing in the wet ground along the rivers and creeks of a state that keeps changing around it. The swallowtails still find it. The beetles still pollinate it. Its flowers still open in the morning and close at night, pushing out that lemon-sweet scent into whatever version of Georgia happens to exist at the time.
Tony Harris's garden at Green Meadows Preserve is open seven days a week, free of charge. It's an interpretive site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, maintained through the National Park Service. The plants in the garden are the plants the Cherokee people actually used—for medicine, for ceremony, for food. They are native plants. They belong to the place.
The sweetbay magnolia stands among them. It has been standing there a long time.
