Magnolias in Colorado

Enthusiast Roots For Magnolias in Colorado
By DAVE PHILIPPS - THE GAZETTE
April 11, 2007 - 9:08AM

If anything could have proven that magnolias don’t belong in Colorado, it would have been this winter’s seemingly endless train of storms and subzero mornings.

But on a recent afternoon, the magnolias in Lee Nicholos’ yard started unfurling bright, fragrant flowers.

“The winter tried to kill my girls and tried to kill ’em, but it can’t kill ’em,” Nicholos said as he paced through the 29 varieties of magnolias starting to leaf out in his yard on Platte Avenue.

Nicholos, 41, seems an unlikely evangelist of the flowering tree. Tall and thin, he wears a bandanna, has a wild, pointy goatee and talks with the bravado of a street fighter. But he has a master’s degree in horticulture and has spent years collecting seeds of hardy magnolias from the foothills of the Himalayas and the snowy reaches of Hawaiian volcanoes.

At his small stucco house downtown, he’s planted the seeds and waged a campaign to convince people that these trees, usually associated with steamy Southern afternoons, can thrive in Colorado.

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