My magnolia is in full bloom outside my back door. It is of course a yearly event and each year it is as magnficient as the last. However this year is the first that I have decided to blog about this event, possibly because I have a dinosaur website to post it to. So the wheels turn slowly but surely. Fossils of magnolias have been found dating back 95 million years ago and were among the first flowering trees to evolve. They have tough petals to attract and resist the attention of beetles who were the pollinators back then before the evolution of bees. Those petals had to withstand those clumsy, foraging beetle visits.
Scientists are still trying to work out the history of flowering plants – they appeared suddenly in the fossil record – Darwin’s ”abominable mystery” with almost no evidence of their evolution before this. Our magnolia flowers have a number of primitive features – petals look almost like the sepals, each flower has many stamens arranged in spiral rows, there are multiple pistles and all the stamens and pistils are supported by a “fingerlike receptacle”. Those beautiful blooms attracted the attention of insects and animals and so began the spread of flowering plants around the world.
So it is a joy to see such beauty manifest in each new dawn to to know that this blooming has taken place each year from time immemorial.
