Friday Fabulous Flower - really ancient?

One of TPP's bright young colleagues, Herve Sauquet, has used a combination of morphology and molecular data to construct or model the first or ancestral flower.  It has several whorls of 3 floral organs and to TPP's eyes, the model so derived looks a lot like a Magnolia virginiana.  Many people have long thought that earliest flowers would have many spirally arranged parts.  Actually there are several differences, so the similarity to a Magnolia is just superficial, mostly just the several perianth whorls.  The oldest fossil flowers just don't look like this and molecular data suggests that flowering plants are older (149-256 my) than the fossil record indicates and so far no one has a really convincing pre-Cretaceous flowering plant fossil.  Several pteridosperms in the fossil record have angiospermy features, but no certain flowering plant ancestor can be identified.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - new Magnolia

If the two previous posts were not teasers enough, having a new Magnolia flower is always a wonderful thing, especially when the magnolia in question was not expected to grow at all.  TPP's new Magnolia is the Ashe Magnolia, either Magnolia macrophylla subspecies (or variety) ashei, or Magnolia ashei, depending upon what proves to be correct.  It certainly is a big-leafed magnolia, even saplings have huge leaves up to 18" long.  And while it can get fairly large with time, it can also be an understory shrub, and part shade is OK.  While this particular species is endemic to the Florida panhandle, where TPP purchased the seedling for $10 (thanks to his sister taking him to a native plant nursery).  Everyone thinks a Florida endemic species growing in the upper Midwest is not a recipe for success, but apparently temperature is not the limiting factor.  Big-leafed Magnolias normal range extends to SE Ohio. And if we get a very cold winter, TPP's ashe magnolia might be in trouble, but it has survived winter lows of 0 F (32 degrees F below freezing for my civilized C readers) without any damage.  Some protection from wind is important; it's those big leaves.  So with some luck TPP will have this tree for years. 
At any rate this magnolia also flowers at a young age and size.  This is just the tree's 3d year, and it's only 4 feet tall.  Fully open this wonderful flower if the size of a dinner plate (12" in diameter), 6 white tepals with a blush of red at their base.  Actually the flower is open and in the female (pollen-accepting) stage when cylindrical.  If you look closely the anthers are shattering and falling into the bases of the tepals (male phase), rather like a southern magnolia, and soon they will be set upon by little beetles.  No question this is quite the flower, and on a 4 foot tall tree, it's downright fabulous. TPP celebrated with a mint julip. And that's it, one flower, this year.  The tree can be obtained from a number of nurseries by mail order should you be interested. 

Magnolia season has begun

Magnolia flowering season has begun, and just in time.  Our earliest magnolia is M. stellata, star magnolia, a very handsome and lacey flower tinged in pink.  About 50% of the time a frosty night ruins the flowers, so TPP planted his where it is shaded in the morning which pushes back its flowering by about 5 to 7 days, a critical amount to avoid frozen flowers.  So far (12 years now) it's been working.  However yesterday the star magnolia on campus was subject to a minor ravaging because its flowers were needed for lab.  As TPP had to explain to a couple of nosy butt-inskies, this is what the campus is for; it represents the largest and most frequently visited classroom on campus, and TPP is the instructor. Figuring out this flower poses another problem because students can only count to 20 (fingers & toes), so the numerous parts of many magnoliad flowers leaves them with basic aboriginal quantification, many parts, and they fail to discover that on average the many parts are multiples of 3.  Don't take TPP's word for it, count the parts on a couple of dozen flowers and see for yourself.  Sigh.  They take my word for it.  The stamens also confuse because they don't look like stamens are supposed to look.Where's the filaments? Where are the sepals? Are those all pistils?  And so begins the not all flowers look like textbook illustrations, in fact, most don't lesson. Just wait until Calycanthus flowers; now that's some fun.  

Obama scores a point

TPP isn't a huge fan of our president, e.g. drones, habeas corpus, secrecy ,and more, but he's certain that Mittens and Eddie Munster would have been a great deal worse.  So given much of TPP's disappointment, he was extraordinarily pleased that Obama presented the government of Israel with a magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora, it appears, the southern magnolia. Now this is a world-class gift!  One that TPP is quite jealous of.  Imagine my surprise when last year a quite remarkable local private garden sported a very hardy southern magnolia.  It's just no fair!  TPP's garden doesn't have a location that protected, so he must make do with other magnolias.  In an effort to be modest, TPP will not intimate that the idea of giving a magnolia, instead of the ever so trite Franklinia, was his. 

Friday Fabulous Flower of the Year

Oh, it's so hard to choose; you're all so lovely, so much fun to blog about, and so important to the Phactor's livelihood, but the Phactor can always fall back on his usual plan, which is when in doubt, pick a Magnolia, even if it requires a bit of a cheat (most of the featured magnolias were not a FFF item, but that designation is fairly new having debuted irregularly in 2010). Ta da, Magnolia kobus, FFF of the year, a likely 2012 addition to the estate, or else one of the yellow-flowered magnolias.

Ludicrous fruit display

The Phactor noticed this ludicrously colorful fruit display this morning on the tree outside his building. What a wonderful presentation this fruit display makes! Looks like something from a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Do you recognize this common genus in fruit?

This fruit is from the bigleafed magnolia (Magnolia macrophylla). The pendent, cone-like fruit is a lurid pink and consists of fruitlets, one from each pistil, in the form of a one or two-seeded follicle (like a milkweed pod). When the fruitlet splits open the seeds dangle forth on a thread and are covered by a fleshy pink-orange aril, a reward for the bird dispersers. The actual seed is black and has a hard shiny seed coat. This time of year a flock of grosbeaks or cedar waxwings will find this tree and an hour later every single seed will be gone.

Know your genera - Lesson 3: Magnolia

Magnolias are one of the Phactor’s favorite plants, and as a result, they sort of accumulate around his estate (7 species and counting). What is not to love about their flowers? My sweet bay magnolia is a summer flowering species (late June), and while its creamy white cup-like flowers are on the small end of the range of magnolia flower sizes, they have an exotic, almost intoxicating, floral fragrance. To have a sweet bay magnolia next to your patio, in flower, on a soft warm evening, to accompany your mint julep, served by an attractive woman in a white dress, with some Dixieland jazz in the background, is almost too much to ask for. The Phactor is not greedy and will settle for any 4 out of the five.

The flowers open around 5 pm, rather quickly, and attract beetles with their fragrance all evening. Somewhat surprisingly, this southeastern, mostly coastal species, Magnolia virginiana, will grow here in Lincolnland as far north as zone five. My present specimen survived -19F this past winter and still flowered! A previous specimen was not so hardy, so always check the nursery source of the stock to make certain you get a hardy genotype, if that may be a problem. Up here in Lincolnland sweet bay magnolia mostly grows as a large shrub; in its native range it’s a tree.

Magnolia is an honorific for Pierre Magnol, a professor of botany at Montpellier in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and he must have been well liked by Linnaeus (aka Carl von Linné) to have had such handsome plants named after him.

Long-time readers may detect a certain pattern in the know-your- genera lessons. You already know lots of scientific names, even if you were not aware you did.

Spring in Lincolnland

Spring here in Lincolnland in the great American Midwest is more of a concept, a theoretical construct, than a reality. As if to prove my point nature provided our flowering bulbs and climatically stupid star magnolias with a snow covering and now plans to back up wintery threats with temperatures several degrees below freezing. And that’s the way it is here as often as not. Enough mild weather emerges from the cocoons of spring to raise your hopes and expectations with green buds and early flowers only to have them dashed down by one more cold front marching eastward like a chilly army bent on defeating spring.

No actual spring occurs here really. Just warring fronts, pushing back and forth, first mild, then bitter, back and forth again, and the war continues until suddenly one day in mid-May summer pushes through and exhausted by all the charging and retreating rests for five months. The weather war is repeated with the opposite outcome in November after summer hangs on well into October. It’s no wonder that those folks who live lives insulated from the reality of nature simply switch the thermostat from heat to cool without opening nary a window. And I know they do this because I’ve bought their houses and struggled to reopen windows painted shut all those years ago when central air was installed.

But no matter how buffered they are, I can’t live that way, so I fall for it every year. I emerge with the first whiff of mild weather to plant and prune and coax with the hopes of a spring and they get buried in a funeral shroud of white snow. Is there anything sadder than a magnolia festooned with drooping brown flowers? And the Phactor knows it’s really our fault for planting them too far north, but the alternative, to live without them, is unthinkable, and so for this reason the movement to landscape with only native plants will fail to capture my heart or enthusiasm. So you live for that one year in two, or three, if we are fortunate, that the magnolias will burst forth in flower without any critcal comment from old man winter.

What's left Tuesday will struggle back, sprouting up from its base, defiant. And the tough plants will once again show their toughness, their raison d'etre for being, yet, I think I shall provide my little coldframe with a bit of thermal assistance tonight, and we may yet enjoy some salad before May.