Friday Fabulous Flower - Last Magnolia of the Season

It has been a pretty good year for Magnolias; no late frosts and plenty of rain, almost too much.  When the gardens finally get to June, the Magnolias are just about done flowering, except for the sweet bay, Magnolia virginiana.  In our area this species never grows into a full-fledged tree and generally grows as a largish shrub. Some genotypes have trouble with the winter cold so choose your nursery well, preferably to your north.  Ours does not produce a big floral display, but rather a few flowers at a time, and you are more likely to notice their stunning fragrance than their visual display.  The floral odor is a sort of musky fruity fermenty mix that little beetles just love.

Seed dispersal display

Fruits are flowers at the stage of seed dispersal.  As such many have attractive displays for the purpose of attracting seed dispersers with the promise of a reward, either the edible fruit itself or a fleshy seed coat, or a fleshy tissue surrounding the seed, an aril.  Here's the seed dispersal display of a sweet bay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana).  Magnolias have many pistils in each flower and each makes a fruitlet, usually a tough little dry follicle that opens along one seam to release or reveal one or two aril-covered seed.  The bright orange-red fleshy aril is both the visual attraction and the reward, the seed has a dark-brown tough seed coat. The seeds actually dangle on a thread to attract even more attention from birds who after digesting off the aril regurgitate the seed.  Displays like this can last days, and disappear quickly when a flock of cedar waxwings stop by.

Making sense of scents

One of the Phactors favorite early summer plants is Magnolia virginiana, sweet bay. In our area is grows as a large shrub, and rather than flowering in a big, all at once bang, it produces a few flowers for a couple of weeks. Among all of the cultivated magnolias, this species probably has the smallest flowers, 8-10 cm across when open, but what a display! But it's not a visual display although the creamy white perianth is pretty enough; it's an olfactory display. In the early evening and through the night, the recently opened flowers flood the area with a magnificent fragrance, almost intoxicating. If the air is still you can pick up the distinctive odor from 30 or 40 feet away, even further if you are down breeze, and that's with a human nose, not the keen sensory apparatus of an insect. When you actually stick your nose right up to the flower, the scent is almost overpowering. And it's very difficult to describe, spicy-floral-musky-pheromony type of scent. Wow! That's why you plant these fairly close to your patio. They attract an array of small beetles who find the flowers by following these plumes of scent and then sort of blundering into the cup shaped flowers.