Magnolia is named after Pierre Magnol, a 17th-century French botanist after whom the magnolia tree was named in 1703. The magnolia is one of the oldest flowering plants on earth — fossil records show it existed before bees evolved, when beetles were the principal pollinators.
Magnolia as a girl's name is recent, entering the U.S. top 1000 in 2013 and rising. The Southern American association is strong — Mississippi is the Magnolia State.
Magnolia does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
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In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Magnolia reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.