The magnolia family
Magnoliaceae is a small, ancient family of trees whose flowers are put together on a plan that predates the arrangement almost every other flowering plant now uses. Looking at one closely is the easiest way to see what an early flower was like.
two genera
roughly 250 species
Eastern Asia and the Americas, with nothing in between
Everything in this guide that belongs to Magnoliaceae
Nearly every flower you handle is organized in rings. A ring of sepals, a ring of petals, a ring of stamens, a fixed and countable number of each. A magnolia is not built that way. Its parts are set in a rising spiral on a central column, the way scales are set on a pine cone, and the number is not fixed at all: two flowers on the same branch can carry different counts of everything.
The outer parts are not divided into sepals and petals either. They are all tepals, the same thickness and the same color as each other, which is why a magnolia flower has no green collar underneath it and seems to be made entirely of one material.
Above them, in that same spiral, sit dozens of thick strap shaped stamens and then dozens of separate simple carpels, each carpel its own small closed unit rather than a shared chamber. The column carrying all of it stands proud in the middle. It is a flower assembled from many repeating parts rather than from a few specialized ones.
A magnolia flower will not fertilize itself, and it prevents it with timing rather than chemistry. On the first day the carpels are receptive and the stamens are still shut. Only on the second day, once the carpels have gone past receptivity, do the stamens shed. A single flower is therefore female first and male afterward, and never both at once.
The flower is also open on the first day and closes again overnight, which is not decorative. Anything that came in for the first day is shut inside until the second, by which time the stamens are shedding and the visitor leaves loaded. Since the flower it came from is now past taking pollen, the load has to be carried to a different flower to be worth anything, which is precisely the point.
The thick tepals and the heavy build make sense in that light. This is a flower that is handled roughly by insects with chewing mouthparts and shut around them for a night, and it is constructed to take it.
Because each carpel is separate, they do not ripen into one fruit. They ripen into dozens, still attached to the same column, so what follows the flower is a knobbly upright cone that looks more like a conifer or a small pineapple than anything a broadleaf tree should be producing.
Then it opens. Each segment splits, and out of each comes a seed coated in a brilliant scarlet or orange fleshy layer. They do not fall. They hang below the cone on fine white elastic threads, several inches long, swinging in the air at eye level for days.
The thread is the seed's own tissue, drawn out into a filament. Nothing else in a temperate garden does this, it is the best two weeks of the magnolia year, and almost nobody who buys the branches in spring ever sees it.
The family has only one other genus, and it is not a shrub. The tulip tree is one of the largest hardwoods in eastern North America, straight trunked and well over a hundred feet, and it carries genuinely tulip shaped flowers in green and orange high in its own canopy where they are almost impossible to see from the ground. People live under them for years without knowing the tree flowers.
It is a serious timber tree, sold as yellow poplar although it is no kind of poplar, and it is one of the heaviest nectar producers in the American forest, giving a dark strong honey. Its leaf is unmistakable: it looks as though the tip has been cut off square with scissors.
The family's split between eastern Asia and the Americas, with the whole of Europe empty in between, is the same broken pattern several old northern families show, and it is the mark of a group that was continuous before the climate cooled.