Minding The Magnolias
Seeing the forest and the trees
“Don’t miss the magnolias. They’re blooming.”
Was that helpful advice or an admonition I wondered as I thanked the woman at the ticket kiosk and entered the San Francisco Botanical Garden on a warm and sunny winter Saturday afternoon. My in-laws are in town and my wife and I decided, with our daughters occupied with activities, it was a beautiful day for a trip to Golden Gate Park.
Unbeknownst to us, the Botanical Garden had made the big announcement on their Instagram account two weeks earlier that the “Magnificent Magnolias” had started to flower. The post has over a thousand likes. We had stumbled into a time of “peak bloom.”
At first, I wondered whether we would find the trees among the more than 50 acres of botanical wonder competing for our attention. But when we did, I realized you couldn’t miss them. They are spectacular.
I love being around plants but I am aware that I don’t know much about them. I envy those who can speak their language with native fluency. It is a joy to walk with a naturalist or botanist who can point out all the details that I miss and explain how the species I can’t differentiate interact with their larger ecosystems. Sure, I have a fancy smartphone in my pocket and an app that lets me scan pictures of what I see for identification. It’s not bad, but most of what it comes up with is broad generalizations. Nothing beats knowing what you’re seeing.
The Botanical Gardens is divided by geographic location and as we wandered from the Andean Cloud Forest to South Africa, I thought about how indigenous people understood plants with a keen sensitivity gleaned from the accrued knowledge of countless generations of observation. Sadly, too much of that knowledge was undervalued by colonizers and lost forever.
Thankfully, the magnolia is iconic enough that it’s not hard for even a novice like me to identify. But getting up close, touching and smelling the flowers, and observing the tree on which they were growing, I realized I didn’t know much about the plant at all other than it’s famous in the southern United States, I have reported from the “Magnolia State” (Mississippi), and it featured prominently in the film Steel Magnolias (which came out 35 years ago!!!).
It turns out, there is a lot more that makes magnolias special. The plant has been around for at least 95 million years, according to the fossil record. That puts them in the time of the dinosaurs and before there were bees. (I’ll have to tell my neighbor the beekeeper). Magnolias evolved to have beetles as their primary pollinator. As the Smithsonian’s webpage on magnolias explains, “Due to this relationship magnolia flowers have tough carpels—the female parts of the flower—to avoid damage from beetle mandibles as they feed looking for pollen.” And that’s only one part of their ancient history still evident today.
We may not be able to see the dinosaurs, but we can still see what they saw. Like magnolias. And that’s pretty remarkable.
As some of you may know, making science documentaries is now my primary profession. I am currently working to develop one about the wonders of trees and human interactions with the arboreal world. One of the notions that spurred our interest is the idea of “plant blindness,” basically that many of us humans are not nearly as aware of plants and their role on earth as we should be. We tend to have a bias towards animals, which move and catch our eyes. Plants tend to recede into the background.
The truth is, of course, that all of the kingdoms, phyla, and classes of the tree of life on Earth are interrelated. Plants are essential to the very air we breathe.
After spending an afternoon in the Botanical Garden, I was eager to return. I want to turn my attention to our backyard garden, as limited as it may be. I am eager for the rainy season to end, so I can head out for hikes on trails not impassable with mud.
But the rain can’t end too soon. Because all these wonderful plants need water to grow.
"We may not be able to see the dinosaurs, but we can still see what they saw. Like magnolias. And that’s pretty remarkable."
Nice, Elliot. So is today's title.
I am so glad you will be giving more attention to plants. I love the way they talk to each other, defend their young, and function symbiotically to support LIFE. My best friends when I was little were a meadow and a sassafras tree. You might enjoy books by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss. I hope you find this path exciting, rewarding, and enhancing your view of just how connected we (all of life) are.