The history of the Magnolia, how we can learn from unlucky beetles, and what the very first flower might have looked like.

*Photomicrographs of Pelretes vivificus from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber*

Around 98.2 million years ago, as the first birds were evolving from terapods, a short winged flower loving beetle wandered into (or under) a drop of mid-Cretaceous tree sap. This ended the poor bug’s life, sadly, but preserved forever a precious and rare moment of early angiosperm pollinivory: the consumption (and transfer) of flower pollen by an insect.

Angiosperms are the flowering plants (Gymnosperms don’t flower; think conifers and ginkgos) and account for at least 80 percent of all living green plants. They arrived before modern pollinators like bees and butterflies and adapted early on to accommodate beetles. Bees are specialized as pollination agents, with behavioral and physical modifications like long tongues for extracting nectar, as well as scopal hairs and pollen baskets for scooping up and depositing pollen. They are light and quick and have no interest in harming the plant itself. Bees have excellent vision and are readily attracted to a stunning array of color and shape. The humble beetle, in contrast, has only a fuzzy underbelly to transport pollen, but is clumsy and slow and thrives on devouring plant matter. They are known as ‘mess and soil’ pollinators as a nod to their proclivity for eating through leaves and dumping frass. As a result, precocious angiosperms evolved thicker flowers and tough leaves to survive. The earliest animal-pollinated flowers were shallow, cup-shaped blooms that were heavily scented to attract less visually motivated insects. Humans tend to describe flowers pollinated by beetles as spicy, sweet, musky, or fermented like overripe fruit. They were usually white and cream to pale green or even burgundy.

In August 2017, Jurg Schonenberger and colleagues reconstructed ancestral flowers using model based algorithms and ‘the largest data set of floral traits ever assembled’ in an attempt to conceptualize Earth’s primordial blooms. The final images were whorled, radially symmetric, and strikingly similar to a Magnolia.

*Original angiosperm, as modeled by Jurg Schonenberger et al*

Magnolias are old. Because flowers are fragile and only in the luckiest of circumstances made into fossils, it is difficult to say exactly how old. Fossilized specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and fossils of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae family date to 95 million years ago. Magnolias are thought by some to be the first flowering plant. To be fair, this is mostly conjecture: others argue for the now extinct Archaefructus. Some of its ancient neighbors found in fossil records from roughly the same period include sweetgum, sycamore, birch, and oak. Tulip trees (yellow poplar), paw-paw, sweetshrub, and water lilies are notably primitive as well.

Magnolia is a large genus of about 210 to 340 species in the subfamily Magnolioideae of the family Magnoliaceae. It is named after Pierre Magnol, a French 17th century botanist who did much to lay the groundwork for the Linnean system we use today. To honor his botanical work, botanist Charles Plumier named the genus Magnolia in 1703.

The natural range of Magnolia species is a ‘disjunct distribution’, with a primary center in east and southeast Asia and a secondary center in the Americas. The earliest western record of magnolias in cultivation is found in Aztec history at the time of Montezuma (c. 1400) where there are illustrations of what we now know to be the very rare M. dealbata. The first magnolia came to British shores in 1688 from the United States, courtesy of John Bannister, a missionary in Virginia, who returned with M. virginiana.

Much of the magnolia tree has been leveraged over the years, a bit unexpectedly, for culinary purposes. In parts of England, the petals of M. grandiflora are pickled and used as a spicy condiment. In some Asian cuisines, the buds are pickled and used to flavor rice and scent tea. In Japan, the young leaves and flower buds of M. hypoleuca are broiled and eaten as a vegetable. Older leaves are made into a powder and used as seasoning; dried, whole leaves are placed on a charcoal brazier and filled with miso, leeks, daikon, and shiitake, and broiled. So called ‘Hoba miso’ uses such magnolia leaf seasoning. Tea made from the bark was used in the past as a quinine substitute in the treatment of malaria and typhoid.

*Flower anatomy, featuring the tepals of a Narcissus*

Like other beetle pollinated plants of the day, Magnolias adapted to successful pollination strategies available at the time. To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the leaves of the Magnolia and carpels (female reproductive bits) are rugged and thick. The bud is enclosed in a bract (a supportive leaf) rather than a sepal and the usually green leaf-like sepals and colorfully recognizable petals are not morphologically disparate, but rather present as an undifferentiated melding of the two called cleverly: a ‘tepal’.

Thus, to look at a magnolia flower is to appreciate something quite ancient and distinct from the lilies and daisies and tulips we are used to. The structure is unmistakably archaic, but at the same time, fetchingly sublime.

Knowledge Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105579032100292X

https://gardens.si.edu/learn/blog/the-botany-of-magnolias/#:~:text=Magnolias%20evolved%20on%20Earth,know%20them%20today%20as%20beetles.

https://visit.caerhays.co.uk/the-estate/the-gardens/history-of-magnolias/

http://www.hort.cornell.edu/bjorkman/lab/arboretum/trees/magnolia_part1.html

https://arboriculture.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/a-history-of-the-magnolia/

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3940

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.16274#:~:text=Oaks%20arose%20an%20estimated%2056,et%20al.%2C%202020).

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/11/study-challenges-widely-held-assumption-bee-evolution

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0530#:~:text=Pollinivory—the%20consumption%20of%20pollen,Anthophila%3B%20the%20flower%20lovers).

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-021-00893-2

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/revealed-the-first-flower-140-million-years-old-looked-like-a-magnolia/

https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05-magnolia-pollination

http://www.xerces.org/blog/notes-from-other-orders-beetles-as-pollinators

https://blog.oup.com/2016/04/dinosaurs-timeline-infographic/

https://www.britannica.com/plant/angiosperm

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms16047