Medicinal Herbs

Magnolia Bark Extract

Magnolia officinalis

Magnolia bark — hậu phác, hou po — is the purple-brown trunk bark of Magnolia officinalis, a large deciduous tree growing to twenty-five metres. Its alternate leaves are thick-stalked and very big, twenty to forty centimetres long and ten to twenty across; fragrant cream-white flowers, which appear on trees of about fifteen years on average, give way to an ovoid compound fruit ten to twelve centimetres long. The closely related M. biloba differs only in its notched, two-lobed leaf. The bark holds about one per cent of an essential oil built on phenolic compounds, chiefly magnolol and honokiol, alongside a small quantity of alkaloids.