The real name of this exotic tree is Big-leaf Magnolia or Magnolia macrophylla (which translates exactly to "Big-leaf Magnolia"!). The Jurassic Park moniker was bestowed on this tree by Eileen Schwinn and it fits. It is not a towering tree but it has the largest leaf and the largest single flower of any North American plant, something you'd expect to find in California or Texas perhaps but not in your own back yard. And the Jurassic Park designation is reasonably accurate for another reason: magnolias are among the most ancient of flowering plants and because they are even older than the bees, they have to be pollinated by beetles. That's the way they did it in the old days!
The fruit of this pollination is a sort of pineapple or pinecone-like fruit in which the seeds are enclosed, putting the plant in a category between the gymnosperms and angiosperms -- in other words half-way between conifers, cycads and ginkos on the one hand and the 'true' flowering plants on the other. Big-leaf Magnolia is native to the southeast where it is considered rather rare and even endangered. But our grove of trees (which must have seeded in from a garden plant) appears to be flourishing, self-sustaining and even spreading. Right now the trees are sporting a good crop of large white flowers which unfold from their giant buds to reveal great floppy white petals (known as tarpals). These have no smell but apparently produce copious amounts of pollen to feed the beetles which they need to fertilize the cones, a system that is thought to have remained unchanged since the Mesozoic Era (to be technically correct, magnolias belong to the early Cretaceous just after the Jurassic; in any case, this tree's ancestors were indeed well acquainted with the dinosaurs)!
At the opposite extreme, there is a miniature plant coming up in patches in the hurricane-blasted meadow in front of the house. It has tiny leaves and tiny four-petaled blue flowers . I think this is one of the speedwells. I need to get a magnifying glass to look at the flower and possibly identify the exact species. It is rather an exotic little thing; if it were bigger it would be an attractive garden plant.
No sign of the Tricolored Heron this morning; instead there was a Black-crowned Night-Heron and a Willet in the pond at low tide. The Red-eyed Vireo was singing all morning along with a foraging Common Yellowthroat, a Great Crested Flycatcher, a Baltimore Oriole and, a bit later, that champ singer, a Brown Thrasher, all forming a kind of punctuated background music
Eric Salzman
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