A series following the 72 British mini-seasons of Nature’s Calendar by Kiera Chapman, Lulah Ellender, Rowan Jaines and Rebecca Warren.
Dear Readers, I seem to have been going on a lot about magnolias this year – here’s my most recent post, to give you a bit of background. But I’d never heard them being described as hallucinogenic before, so my curiosity was piqued.
In her piece in ‘Nature’s Calendar’, Rowan Jaines explains that the first Western record of the magnolia dates back to the time of Montezuma and the Aztecs, when Spanish naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo described many species, including Magnolia dealbata, the Cloudforest Magnolia. Hernández also quoted some Aztec poetry, which linked the brief flowering of the magnolia to the transience of life:
‘Listen, I say! On earth we’re known only briefly, like the magnolia. We only wither, O Friend!’
Cloudforest Magnolia (Magnolia dealbata) Photo By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=655799
Rowan Jaines describes how the petals on magnolia turn brown and fall at the slightest touch of cold or rain, and suggests that the ‘fragile and fleeting nature of the magnolia’s flowers lend them a phosphorescent quirk, flashes of brilliance’. I’m not sure quite what she means here, but a scientific paper from 1995 suggests that magnolia blossom fluoresces under ultraviolet light, as indeed it does – magnolia was originally pollinated by beetles, so this might be a way of attracting them.
Ashe’s Magnolia, showing stigma under UV light (Photo from https://www.facebook.com/magnoliasociety/posts/850378203782280/, photo by Jeff Talbert)
In fact, magnolia not only attracts beetles, it traps them – both male and female reproductive organs are present on the same tree, but like many plants who are monoecious, it wants to be pollinated by a different tree and to avoid pollinating itself except as a last resort. So, the beetles fly into the flower and are trapped overnight when the flower closes. By the following morning, the beetles are covered in pollen and eager to get going, so as soon as the flowers open they head off to pastures new.
Magnolia with a fine selection of beetles (Photo By Beatriz Moisset – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4824216)
As I’ve probably mentioned before, magnolias are beetle-pollinated because they evolved prior to bees and other social insects – magnolias were flowering during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. And what a picture that conjures up! Magnolia was once found right across Europe, Asia and Americas, but today the trees are only found in the southern US and southern China. For me, they are one of the fleeting beauties of spring.
