Magnolia vine

One of the stranger plants in our gardens is the magnolia vine (also called the 5-flavored fruit vine)(Schisandra chinensis)(Schisandraceae). As readers well know, TPP has a thing for magnolias, and anything with that name included. As many readers will not know the flowering plants have three basal lineages referred to as the ANA lineages. The first A is for Amborella, a genus that is native to New Caledonia only, a bit of old Gondwana.  N is for Nymphyaeales, the waterlilies and their close relatives. The 2nd A is for the Austrobaileyales, which includes the magnolia vine. These lineages have ancient common ancestries with the rest of flowering plants. So when you have taught plant diversity and plant taxonomy for so long, you like having these specimens around. A second, and more mundane reason is that at the corner of our house is an old, but very sturdy TV antenna tower from the pre-cable days.  It has two current functions: one, it's an emergency escape ladder from a bedroom's balcony, and two, it serves as a trellis for the magnolia vine where it regularly climbs well above the roof line. At any rate it flowers in the spring although the flowers are not very large (about 1 cm across) or very colorful (sort of light greenish to cream colored).  But the floral parts are spirally arranged rather than in whorls. While supposedly dioecious, our vine is monoecious probably selected for producing fruit with only one vine. The flowers are "unisexual", either having pistils or anthers. The image shows one flower of each "sex" (the pistils are green). Eventually, the pistils will ripen to red fruitlets (very tart) and if like members of the rose family, the fruit would look rather like a raspberry, but the post-pollination elongation of the receptacle spatially separates the fruitlets so that they look like individual fruits on a flowering stalk, a feature that may be present in some of the earliest fossil flowers.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Basal Angiosperm Flower at the stage of seed dispersal

An old, but very sturdy TV antenna tower (remember those?) stands at the corner of our house, and it seemed like a good idea to plant a vine next to such a good climbing structure. The vine is Kadsura japonica, magnolia vine, and it occupies an interesting phylogenetic position that you are probably not aware of. Angiosperm taxonomy used to be easy: monocots and dicots. Monocots are still pretty easy, but not dicots. At the base of the flowering plant "family" tree are three lineages that have the most ancient common ancestries with the rest of the flowering plants. And one of these three lineages includes the Schisandraceae, the Schisandra family, which has two genera: Kadsura and Schisandra. The flowers of this species have either lots of pistils or leafy anthers, but not both, surrounded by a perianth not differentiated into petals and sepals, and all the parts are spirally arranged. Each pistil develops into a red fruitlet borne upon a much elongated receptacle (think long skinny strawberry). In the two flowers shown, at the stage of seed dispersal, you can see both the mature fruitlets and abortive ones that didn't get pollinated. The red fruitlets are edible, although pretty tart, and if enough of them could be reached (the vine is now 15+ feet above the roof of our house) some basal angiosperm jelly would be in the offing. Soon a flock of cedar waxwings, or some other dinosaurian relative (how appropriate for such an ancient lineage!) will appear, and the fruitlets will disappear. Although sensitive to late spring frosts, the vine is hardy in zone 5 and probably in zone 4 too. Just the thing to hide that old antenna tower!