Magnolia, you sweet thing

Every spring when the magnolias bloom, I think about how beautiful and fragrant they are, and how primitive they are, among the Earth’s plants.  For years I have tried to find an essay I read while in graduate school, in which the author described a driving trip from the Midwest to western North Carolina, in search of the mountain ecosystem that protected magnolias during the last Ice Age, allowing this ancient plant to live with us today.

This spring, after more than three decades of searching, I found the book I had read in grad school: Reading the Landscape of America, by May Theilgaard Watts.  It is a beautiful series of essays, each focused on a particular north American ecosystem, and described using an ecological perspective.   Part natural history, part cultural history, written in the first person, each chapter manages to be scholarly and friendly at the same time.  Watts, an ecologist trained  at the University of Chicago by pioneering ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles, effortlessly brings together the many threads of deep time and present time, crystalized in the context of personal stories. The book was first published in 1957, and republished with updates (often about disappearing ecosystems) in 1999.

I first encountered magnolias when I moved to North Carolina for college in the 1970s. The Duke East Campus had magnificent old trees, with limbs drooping to the ground, forming habitable environments and generating a lazy thicket of new trees around the campus perimeter. Once I participated in a modern dance performance in the Duke Gardens which included an improvisation, performed by dancer Diane Eilber and a magnolia. The dance was puzzling but clearly still haunts me all these years later. I think of Eilber’s dance, and the trees—in North Carolina, Florida, and everywhere in between and beyond—as part of a rolling fabric: beautiful, elegant, lazy, majestic, and ancient.

In college, too, of course I heard J.J. Cale sing “Magnolia.” The song is still moving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8WzDO_hj8A

For me, magnolias are a timebleed, a reassuring reminder that our planet continues to create amazing life, despite the tribulations caused by those of us responsible for the sixth extinction.  When I see them, I remind myself that they will likely remain, long after we are gone.