She never made it to Washington. Her magnolia did.

The grief, the love, and the flower that stood on the White House lawn for nearly 200 years.

Visiting back east, as I do a couple of times each year, I recently stopped to photograph a Magnolia Grandiflora in full bloom. We have magnolias in Southern California too — some of them even familiar — but they're not quite the same. The ones I grew up with have a presence about them, a scale and a scent that belongs to long summer evenings and slow walks down the road, the sweet fragrance of those great blooms hanging in the warm, humid air.

That photograph became the inspiration for this painting. And while I was working on it, I found myself digging into the history of this flower I've loved for as long as I can recall — and found myself connecting to another Southern lady who had loved this flower, and the husband who carried it with him as a remembrance of her.

When I named this painting Southern Belle, I was thinking of the magnolia the way most of us know her — grand, creamy-white, unhurried. A flower that seems to have always been here, rooted deep in the red southern clay, perfuming every warm afternoon like it's the most natural thing in the world.

But there's another story behind that flower. One that draws me to it even more than my southern roots do..

In 1828, Andrew Jackson won the presidency in one of the most brutal campaigns in American history to that point. His opponents didn't just go after him — they went after his wife, Rachel, publicly questioning her character and the validity of their marriage. She had been in poor health for years. The cruelty of the campaign, many believed, made her worse.

Days after he won, she died. Jackson moved into the White House a widower — and he brought something with him from their home in Tennessee: a cutting from Rachel's favorite magnolia tree.

"He had it planted outside the White House in her honor, as a lasting testament to their continuing love, even after death."

That tree — what history came to call the Jackson Magnolia — stood on the South Lawn for nearly two centuries. Presidents breakfasted beneath it. Churchill and Roosevelt are said to have sat in its shade. For seventy years, it appeared on the back of the $20 bill. First Ladies commissioned china painted with its blossoms. Seedlings from it were gifted to foreign nations, planted in Cuba, tended in secret greenhouses.

All of it rooted in one man's grief, and one woman who never got to see any of it.

Rachel Jackson was a Southern woman of her era — private, devoted, fond of her garden. She never wanted Washington. She never wanted the spotlight. And yet, through a single tree planted in her memory, she has been present at inaugurations, state dinners, and the sweep of American history in ways she never could have imagined.

That, to me, is the soul of the magnolia. Not just beauty. Endurance. Quiet, stubborn, fragrant endurance — the kind that outlasts everything thrown at it.

That's what I was chasing when I painted Southern Belle.

Southern Belle — original magnolia painting. Authorized prints will be available end of May 2026. Pre-orders accepted now.