Floral Fascination
by Geri Glavis
Title
Floral Fascination
Artist
Geri Glavis
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
Photography by Geri Glavis, copyright 2015.
Magnolia is a large genus of about 210[notes 1] flowering plant species in the subfamily Magnolioideae of the family Magnoliaceae. It is named after French botanist Pierre Magnol.
Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees did, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles. To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the carpels of Magnolia flowers are extremely tough. Fossilised specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae date to 95 million years ago.[1] Another aspect of Magnolia considered to represent an ancestral state is the flower bud is enclosed in a bract rather than in sepals; the perianth parts are undifferentiated and called tepals rather than distinct sepals and petals. Magnolia shares the tepal characteristic with several other flowering plants near the base of the flowering plant lineage such as Amborella and Nymphaea (as well as with many more recently derived plants such as Lilium).
The natural range of Magnolia species is a disjunct distribution, with a main centre in east and southeast Asia and a secondary centre in eastern North America, Central America, the West Indies, and some species in South America.
The name Magnolia first appeared in 1703 in the Genera[2] of Charles Plumier (1646�1704), for a flowering tree from the island of Martinique (talauma). English botanist William Sherard, who studied botany in Paris under Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a pupil of Magnol, was most probably the first after Plumier to adopt the genus name Magnolia. He was at least responsible for the taxonomic part of Johann Jacob Dillenius's Hortus Elthamensis[3] and of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.[4] These were the first works after Plumier's Genera that used the name Magnolia, this time for some species of flowering trees from temperate North America. The species that Plumier originally named Magnolia was later described as Annona dodecapetala by Lamarck,[5] and has since been named Magnolia plumieri and Talauma plumieri (and still a number of other names) but is now known as Magnolia dodecapetala.[notes 2]
Carolus Linnaeus, who was familiar with Plumier's Genera, adopted the genus name Magnolia in 1735 in his first edition of Systema Naturae, without a description, but with a reference to Plumier's work. In 1753, he took up Plumier's Magnolia in the first edition of Species Plantarum. There he described a monotypic genus, with the sole species being Magnolia virginiana. Since Linnaeus never saw a herbarium specimen (if there ever was one) of Plumier's Magnolia and had only his description and a rather poor picture at hand, he must have taken it for the same plant which was described by Catesby in his 1730 Natural History of Carolina. He placed it in the synonymy of Magnolia virginiana var. f�tida, the taxon now known as Magnolia grandiflora. Under Magnolia virginiana Linnaeus described five varieties (glauca, f�tida, grisea, tripetala, and acuminata). In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1759), he merged grisea with glauca, and raised the four remaining varieties to species status.[notes 3]
By the end of the 18th century, botanists and plant hunters exploring Asia began to name and describe the Magnolia species from China and Japan. The first Asiatic species to be described by western botanists were Magnolia denudata and Magnolia liliiflora,[notes 4] and Magnolia coco and Magnolia figo.[notes 5] Soon after that, in 1794, Carl Peter Thunberg collected and described Magnolia obovata from Japan and at roughly the same time Magnolia kobus was also first collected.[
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March 22nd, 2015
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