Golden Champaa Plant/ Swarn champaa (Magnolia champaca)

Description

Golden Champaa Plant/ Swarn champaa (Magnolia champaca)

Synonyms: Magnolia champaca.

Michelia is one of the most popular flowering trees. It belongs to the Magnoliaceae family, the family of sub-tropical bushes and small trees; It is also one of the ancient families of the plant kingdom having existed for 95 million years. The flowers of Golden Champa are best known and used in India for several purposes. They are primarily used for worship at temples, floated in bowls of water to scent the room, as a fragrant decoration for bridal beds, for garlands, in religious ceremonies, and generally worn in hair by women as a means of beauty ornament as well as a natural perfume. Golden Champa is a very useful agroforestry tree too! It is known to fix the atmospheric nitrogen in soil with the help of vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizae.

Its leaves provide very useful mulch. It improves the soil under tree cover by increasing pH, soil organic carbon, and available phosphorus. Hence it is used to reforest badly eroded areas. Its leaves are used as larval fodder by silkworms & butterflies.