Entry #8: Silent Witness

Tuesday, April 11, 2017
68 degrees F

Late afternoon and I am working in my front yard, using a pitchfork to scoop chunks of composted mulch into my wobbly wheelbarrow. Dark brown in color, the mulch pile stands taller than my head; it is a rounded mountain--ten cubic yards of shredded hardwood scraps. With each thrust of the pitchfork, the mulch's earthy aroma fills my nostrils. Clouds of steam rise into the air. I breathe in the familiar smell, a combination of sweet molasses and cured tobacco. Over the coming weeks, I will spend an hour or so after work each day moving the mulch around my pollinator garden. It is an annual chore, but one I always enjoy. Filling the wheelbarrow and rolling it across my yard. Dumping the mulch into the garden, then smoothing it out with my hands. I love to watch the rich, dark mulch cover the gray, weather-worn soil. Like giving an old wall a new coat of paint.

Watching me while I work, the grand magnolia stands as a green goddess over the garden. I am constantly aware of the tree's presence. Pausing to move a strand of hair from my eyes, I study the tree, taking in the full circumference of its base. It completely consumes one half of the yard. The lower branches on the east side are beginning to grow over the sidewalk to our front door.

 "Gotta trim those branches back soon," Terry keeps saying.
 "Wait a little longer," I beg. "I don't care if we have to walk around the branches."

Above my head, I hear the twittering of a pair of chimney swifts. Careening in their courtship flight, they dive and pivot in an acrobatic ballet against the blue sky. The chimney swifts arrived in Carolina Beach last week after a flight of more than 2,000 miles from the Peruvian Amazon. I have been watching and hoping for their return. After removing the cap from our old brick chimney in 2013, Terry and I waited three years until a nesting pair of chimney swifts finally discovered it. For the second year in a row, the swifts are nesting in our chimney. Since swifts usually return to successful nest sites each year, we assume our swifts are the same nesting pair.

March 12- Our first and only
snowfall from the winter of 2017.
 It was gone by early afternoon.

Chimney swifts originally nested along the steep walls of caves and in hollow trees found in old growth forests. The arrival of settlers brought the clearing of old growth forests, but also the construction of houses and factories with suitable chimneys for nesting. In recent years, chimney swift populations have declined as newer homes are being built with narrow flues or permanently capped chimneys. Uncapping our chimney seemed like the right thing to do. While sitting in our den, we hear the drumming vibrations of their wing beats as they enter and leave our chimney. In the evenings and early mornings, their soft singing pipes down through the flue. I imagine the swifts building their half-saucer nest
of small twigs, which they will glue along the inner wall of the chimney using sticky saliva. A nest of sticks and spit--now that's resourceful! If all goes well, we will soon hear the sounds of nestlings echoing throughout our house.

April 11- A magnolia bud is
just beginning to develop.

Since beginning this blog in January, I have watched the magnolia's seasonal changes with close attention. I felt the cold winter wind and chilling drops of rain. From the top of the tree, I watched the sun rise out of the dark blue sea. In mid-March, a sprinkling of snowflakes rested on the magnolia's evergreen leaves for a few hours. Now spring has arrived for the grand magnolia. All around the tree I find the first flower buds beginning to swell in size. The magnificent flowers, nearly eight inches in diameter, will bloom from mid-May through late June. Each flower will open for only one day before the browning petals drop to the ground.


As of this year, the grand magnolia has witnessed sixty springs. Sixty Aprils. Sixty arrivals of migratory birds. I am only six years younger than the tree; I expect it will long outlive me. But for many years to come, I will continue to watch and learn from the magnolia, happy for its companionship throughout the  year. Now, it's time to get back to my mulching before darkness falls!

For photos and more information about chimney swifts, check out this link:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Chimney_Swift/lifehistory

Entry # 7: Glimpse of a Miracle

April 1, 2017
Carolina Beach, NC

It is late in the day on a Saturday afternoon. I have dropped to my knees beneath the grand magnolia to view an architectural marvel. Close to the ground and strung between low-growing branches, a spider web gleams in the long rays of the sun. I didn't see it at first as I walked beneath the tree. But then a stream of sunlight found an opening between the leaves. Like a spotlight shining on a work of art, the beam illuminated the threads of silk.

The web is mostly round with radiating spokes and a winding spiral, the typical web design of spiders known as orbweavers, a family of more than 3,000 species. Some of the strands look ragged and worn. Near the bottom of the web, I observe an oblong hole where the silk has been torn. I do not see the web's builder, which I would expect to find hanging upside down in the central hub. No, the web appears to be abandoned. Raising my index finger, I gently touch a narrow part of the spiral band. The sticky silk attaches to my finger, then breaks apart like a cotton candy fiber.

To build an orb web such as this, the female spider must first climb up to a desired height. Once she has completed her ascent, the spider releases a non-sticky strand of silk from her spinnerets to float upon the air. If the spider is lucky, this first strand, known as the "bridge thread," will land on a distant object. After fastening the bridge thread with a button of silk, the spider creates a non-sticky frame, somewhat triangular in shape. Next come the radiating spokes to which the spider attaches a spiraling band. She slides along, lifting and attaching the silk with the smooth tarsal claws in the middle of her feet. Now that the basic web structure is in place, the spider begins to glue down the final sticky spiral. On average it takes an orbweaver about an hour to create the wheel-shaped web, which is nothing short of astounding. Only an hour to craft a masterpiece that also functions as a hanging net to capture insect prey.

The fossil record reveals that the orbweaver family, Araneidae, evolved about 140 million years ago, which means that spiders had already been weaving webs for 40 million years when the first magnolias bloomed on earth. This relationship between tree and arachnid is long indeed.

The sunlight lingers on the web for only a few minutes, allowing me a narrow time frame to admire its intricate beauty. Here is an optical coincidence in which rays of light-- do they travel in waves or particles?-- reflect from the web and pass through my corneas, which bend the rays through the pupils, and next through the convex lenses that focus the rays on my retinas where millions of light sensitive cells convert the rays into electrical impulses that travel my optic nerves to the occipital lobes at the back of my brain. A spider web! My brain thinks in 13 milliseconds. If I had been standing one inch further to the right or left, my eyes would not have caught the glimmer; the web would have remained invisible, unknown.

Such a knife's edge we walk between glimpsing a miracle and stumbling blind through the darkness.

Entry #6: Hurricane History

March 10, 2017
About 12:00 Noon
70 degrees F

Windy day beneath the Grand Magnolia.
My camouflage chair sits against trunk.

Mid-day-- on a Friday, no less-- and I am sitting in a chair beneath the Grand Magnolia. As the week of my Spring Break winds down, I'm kicking back with a cup of hot tea on a blustery afternoon. The wind slips around me, blowing in gusts to 20 mph out of the Northwest. Looking up into the canopy, I can tell the winds aloft are stronger as the tippy-top branches jerk and twist. My chair leans back against the solid trunk where I feel the vibrations telegraphing down from the wind-blown canopy.

I think about John Muir and his adventures in the upper branches of a Douglas Fir, riding out a violent windstorm in the Yuba River Valley in 1874. "I kept my lofty perch for hours," he writes, "frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past."

For a moment I consider climbing the magnolia to feel the force of the wind, but decide my seat at the base of the tree is equally delightful. Sunlight beams between the swiveling leaves, creating a kaleidoscope of shifting dapples at my feet. Every now and then, a blast of wind cuts under the lowest branches hurtling dead leaves in a swirl. Beyond the wind, I hear the caws of American crows--maybe the only bird with a voice loud enough to project over the wind.

Sitting under the tree beneath thousands of rattling leaves, the wind's voice seems to roar. The shaking branches bend and flex, but I wonder if some might break. Perhaps, but I recognize these are soft breezes barely worthy of calling wind. During the sixty years of its life, this tree has weathered much worse. Many hurricanes, tropical storms, and nor'easters have blown across the island during the past decades. When the Grand Magnolia first grew as a young sapling, it withstood Hurricanes Helene (1958) and Donna (1960). In later years, Hurricanes Diana (which struck twice in 1984) and Bertha (1996) made landfall along the southeast coast.

Hurricane Fran, the strongest hurricane to impact Carolina Beach in the last 25 years, came barreling in from the Atlantic on September 5, 1996. The coordinates at landfall (Cape Fear) meant that the most destructive side of the hurricane, the northeast quadrant, took dead aim at the town. A large hurricane with wind gusts more than 120 mph, Fran leveled hundreds of trees across the island and brought a storm surge of 8-12'.  At the time I lived around the corner from the Grand Magnolia and did not witness its injuries from this hurricane. But I heard that the property lost dozens of longleaf pines, trees which evolved to withstand fire, not hurricane force winds. A series of other storms followed Hurricane Fran including Bonnie and Dennis in 1998, and Floyd in 1999. Throughout these storms, the Grand Magnolia stood strong with most branches and leaves intact.

For several decades, researchers at the University of Florida have studied the impacts of hurricanes on urban trees. Over the course of ten hurricanes, they evaluated more than 150 species to determine what factors cause a particular tree to be more or less resistant to hurricane force winds. As a result of their studies, the researchers created a list of recommended trees for hurricane-prone areas. On the list? Many native tree species including the live oak, bald cypress, flowering dogwood and southern magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora.

Here are my questions: How exactly do southern magnolias stand up to hurricane force winds? Foresters characterize magnolia wood as a soft hardwood because of air pockets inside the grain. Does this feature lend a critical combination of strength and flexibility to a magnolia's trunk? How about their large, thick leaves? Under the stress of high winds, why don't magnolias release their leaves and branches like other trees to increase wind resistance? Looks like I have some more research to do.

The Grand Magnolia has survived six decades of tropical storms and hurricanes, but I remain humble about its future. As meteorologists remind us, it's not a question of if, but when the next powerful hurricane makes landfall on our coast. Who knows what the storm season of 2017 will bring? Today I'm happy to sit here drinking tea while a warm winter breeze gently tousles the branches over my head. I'm grateful for another day with the Grand Magnolia.

For information about the wind resistance of urban trees, please reference the link below:

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/FR/FR17300.pdf

John Muir's quote comes from his essay, "Wind-storm in the Forests of the Yuba."

Entry # 5: Nomenclature

Carolina Beach, NC

Sunset, cloudless sky, 49 °F

This late afternoon I am lying on the cold grass looking up towards the top of the grand magnolia. A prone view is the best way to appreciate the immense size of the tree as the last rays of sunlight linger at the crown. A light breeze jostles the leathery leaves, causing a soft clicking sound. "Grand magnolia," I think to myself. This is my own name for the tree. I imagine that we humans have been naming plants and animals since the development of our many spoken languages. Long ago we began pairing nouns and adjectives in a folk taxonomy system that eventually became the basis for our scientific binomial nomenclature. 

The species we call Magnolia grandiflora has many common names in English: southern magnolia, evergreen magnolia, loblolly magnolia, great laurel magnolia, big laurel, and my favorite name, bull bay. But common names can be confusing. They provide a simple description that is only regionally helpful. For example, the word loblolly describes a type of pine as well as a smaller bay tree. Most true laurels reside in a different plant family than magnolias. Thanks to Carolus Linnaeus, known as the Father of Taxonomy, we developed a codified system for creating unique binomial names for the world's organisms.  

The grand magnolia at sunset.
The genus Magnolia derives its name
from the French Botanist, Pierre Magnol. 

The genus name, Magnolia, has become synonymous with southern culture. Whispering the word conjures images of languid flowers with soft white petals releasing their lemony scent into the humid night air. It rolls off the tongue like a spoonful of blackstrap molasses. You start with the soft syllable, -mag, and flow into the accented second syllable, -nol, which hangs for a moment as the lips draw forward before slurring the third and last syllables into a single -ya. Mag-NOL-ya. The word is best uttered while keeping a loose tongue and jaw for the most sonorous effect. Mag-NOL-ya. Across the south, we use the word to brand golf courses, gated communities, medical clinics, restaurants, magazines, and even a Saturday night music show on my local NPR affiliate called "The Magnolia Fatback Folk Hour." The name has become so entrenched that it seems the trees evolved with the epithet engraved upon their trunks. But the word, "magnolia," has only existed for a little more than three centuries.

In 1695, a French botanical explorer named Charles Plumier (1646-1704), sailed to the West Indies on an expedition for King Louis XIV. Plumier, a Franciscan monk and meticulous observer of natural history, had already completed two previous expeditions to the Caribbean in search of unusual specimens for the King's garden. During this third expedition, Plumier visited the island of Martinique where he found a small evergreen tree with white flowers. We can presume the natives of Martinique had already bestowed a name upon this tree, but Plumier determined that it required a proper Latinized name. Reviving the ancient Greek tradition of naming new species after mentors and patrons, Plumier chose the patronym, Magnolia, in honor of the well-respected French botanist, Pierre Magnol (1638-1715). Magnol was one of the first botanists to create the concept of plant families. 

The genus Magnolia first appeared in Plumier's Nova plantarum Americanarum genera (New Genera of American Plants) in 1703. A few decades later, Linnaeus adopted the genus in the first edition of his Systema naturae in 1735. Linnaeus included the binomial name for the southern magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora, in his tenth edition of Systema naturae.

Plumier would have continued his exploration of the world’s flora and fauna if not for his sudden death. Unfortunately, he died of pleurisy only weeks before he was to depart on an expedition to Peru. Plumier left behind more than 4,000 sketches of plants and animals including hundreds of species new to science. Today his sketches are housed in the The National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Plumier not only gave us the patronym, Magnolia, but also Lobelia and Fuchsia, named for important botanists of his time. In recognition of his contributions to botany, Linnaeus named the genus, Plumeria, in his honor. The magnolia tree that Plumier found in Martinique is now known as Magnolia dodecapetala.

Long before the genus Magnolia entered our botanical lexicon, these evergreen trees with the large white flowers were surely known by other names given by native peoples. In my mind, it isn't too far-fetched to consider that the animals depending upon magnolias for food and shelter-- the crows feasting upon the red berries, the beetles pollinating the flowers, even the dinosaurs that once shared the earth with magnolias--formulated their own "names" for these ancient trees.

Entry # 4: Living Fossil

Wednesday, February 23, 2017
Carolina Beach, NC

It is twilight, the time of "twin-lights," when the essences of day and night blend into a silver sheen. The magnolia's trunk stands in shadow, wearing a cloak of dark green. I look up through the canopy, to the brighter sky holding the sun's last rays. During twilight, one senses the fusion of diurnal and nocturnal elements. A mockingbird sings his repertoire of spring melodies while crickets and other insects begin a long night of fiddling. This dim hour between light and dark encourages journeys of the imagination. The door of day slowly closes as the door of night creaks open, allowing a moment of time travel. As I stand beside the grand magnolia between these doors of twilight, I am thinking about the passage of time. I wrap my arms around the trunk as we hurtle back to the Cretaceous Period during the evolution of magnolias when flowering plants first appeared on earth.

Magnolias and their relatives have lived on our planet for more than 100 million years. The order Magnoliales includes an ancient race of flowering trees. At the time of their evolution in the middle of the Cretaceous Period (144-65 mya), the continental masses were closer together than their current positions. India had already broken off from Antarctica and was slowly cruising towards it collision with what is now Asia. Water inundated the land masses creating inland seas. Iguanodons, Ankylosaurs, Tyrannosaurs and Ceratopsians stomped around in the warmer climate. My front yard, where the grand magnolia grows, was buried underwater in an ocean that reached more than 100 miles inland from its present shoreline.

About 66 million years ago, magnolias witnessed the catastrophic impact of the six-mile wide asteroid that struck an area near the Yucatan peninsula, unleashing a global storm of earthquakes, wildfires and tsunamis. In the aftermath, a rain of fireballs likely sizzled some dinosaurs in their tracks. Scientists speculate the resulting explosion created a tremendous cloud of sulfur-rich dust and vapor that blocked the sun, causing an "impact winter." The amount of sunlight striking the earth may have been reduced to 20% for several decades. Dinosaurs, mosasaurs, pterosaurs, ammonites, large numbers of bird species, four-fifths of all snake and lizard species, two-thirds of mammal species, and a significant percentage of bivalves became extinct. In her book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us that "forests were decimated...diverse plant communities were replaced entirely by rapidly dispersing ferns." In spite of the dust, heat, and low levels of sunlight, the magnolia family survived.

Although we southerners like to think of magnolias as rightfully ours, fossil evidence suggests the birthplace of the magnolia lineage occurred in what is now southeast Asia. Over millions of years, while the continents were still relatively close together, magnolia species colonized North and Central America. Continental drift eventually created what taxonomists call a disjunct distribution of wild magnolias. The fossil record reveals that magnolias have thrived in widespread tropical and subtropical environments, retaining their primeval features. Writing in his book, The Natural Gardens of North Carolina (1932), B.W. Wells calls the magnolia a "'living fossil,' for it has come down little changed from the original type." Today more than 200 species in the genus Magnolia occur in the Old and New World.

It is nearly dark beneath the grand magnolia. I am safely back in the Anthropocene Epoch. Standing in the quiet of a warm night, I imagine the grand magnolia will soon respond to the changing season, replacing the old winter leaves with bright new growth. Just as magnolias have been doing for millions of years.

Entry #3: Sixty Feet Above Sea Level

Carolina Beach, NC
6:46 AM, Fifty-two degrees, F.

The "Snow Moon" sets at dawn.

Early Saturday morning and I'm standing in the crown of the grand magnolia. I have climbed to see the sunrise-- and also the moonset. I turn to view the full moon of February, the "Snow Moon," sinking into pink clouds along the western horizon. Now I look back to the east where a brightening smear of tangerine light spreads across the lower sky. From my treetop perch I have a 360 degree view of my neighborhood gradually coming into focus in the gray light of dawn.

My feet balance on the last sturdy branch before the pliable twigs take up the sky. Any higher and I won't have a reliable handhold. As it is, my position could be considered precarious. But I don't mind. The view is worth it. At about sixty feet above sea level, I have enough vertical height to glimpse the blue ribbon of ocean out of which the sun will slide. Ten minutes to go. A bossy breeze rattles the thick leaves, causing the tiptop to sway. I wrap one arm around the thinning trunk to secure my position, leaving one hand free to take pictures. I am waiting.

Now the crows begin to caw. Get up and get moving, they seem to say. Their raucous shouts identify them as American crows unlike the nasally-voiced fish crows that frequent the ocean shore. The crows fly around my tree; their black bodies flicker past the small windows of light between the leaves. I don't think they see me hiding behind this veil of green. In the distance I hear the softer song of a Carolina chickadee. Sweet-sweet, he sings like a creaking seesaw. From across the southeastern corner of my yard, an Eastern bluebird warbles chu-wee. The first singers of the morning. Soon other birds will add their voices to the growing chorus as males establish territories for spring breeding. Above my head I watch a lacewing, an insect with intricately netted wings, flutter and land on a leaf before flying away. The insects, too, are stirring.

Since childhood I have been a tree-explorer, an arbornaut, a seeker of high secret places. When I was younger, I could wrap my arms and legs around a limbless trunk, and shinny on up to the top. As anyone knows who has ever climbed a magnolia, they are one of the easier trees to ascend due to the close spacing of their radiating branches. As a child I climbed my family's front yard magnolia and many others in our neighborhood. Now in my mid-fifties I climb the grand magnolia with care, thinking about the placement of each hand and foot, showing kindness to each branch. It's a form of meditation. Breathing in, reaching up for a branch, breathing out, resting. Up and up and up as high as I can safely travel.

The canopy of a tree is another world. We know this from research conducted in the great forests of the world. Whole hosts of organisms live out their entire lives without ever touching the ground. I am an earth-bound visitor, a Jill-in-the-Beanstalk ascending towards the sky. Unlike Jack's adventures in the clouds, I am not trespassing in a giant's castle. But if I visit here long often enough, I'm sure to discover arboreal delights as valuable as the gold coins Jack stole from the giant.

A view of the sunrise from the crown.

The moon is setting, as the sun begins to rise. While watching these apparent movements, I remember that I am actually spinning away from the moon and towards the sun. I am perched in a tree anchored at latitude 34 North on an oblate spheroid that is rotating eastward at more than 800 miles per hour. Like riding a merry-go-round where planets and moons and stars and comets are spinning past my field of view. I squint through the leaves to catch the yellow rays as they splinter around a line of stratus clouds. A burning ball of light sits on top of the ocean like a giant egg yolk. Then the sun frees itself from the grasp of the sea and glides up the sky.

Before climbing all the way down, I stop to wedge my body between two angled branches. My right foot braces against a lower branch as my left knee hunches up to serve as a make-shift desk for my journal. As my pencil moves across the page, I hear more birds begin to sing: cardinals, Carolina wrens, house finches, robins. A red-bellied woodpecker trills from a dead tree in my neighbor's yard across the street. Over my head, the broad wings of a turkey vulture swoop past with a rustling sound. For a few more minutes, I am safe in the branches of the grand magnolia as the world awakens around me.

Entry #2: Winter Thunderstorm

Carolina Beach, NC

It's thundering and raining, and I'm hunching underneath the magnolia tree in my front yard. It's a lazy thunderstorm rolling slowly overhead with occasional growls every few minutes. The kind of storm you imagine in the cooler month of January: chilled out, muted, even sleepy. Not like the raging boomers of summer that my father calls "Frog Stranglers."

I had anticipated I wouldn't need an umbrella beneath the magnolia's evergreen canopy. I thought the broad leaves would surely halt the raindrops in their free fall from the sky. But after a short while standing bare-headed beneath the tree, I begin to feel the presence of the rain. Cold drops of water plop on my head, trickle down through my hair, cool the skin of my scalp. As rain falls through the canopy, it also lands on a thick layer of dead leaves. The drops strike the brown leaves with loud rapping sounds as if each is a miniature drum. Tiny pools form in the folds of overturned leaves. Decaying magnolia cones, some gnawed by squirrels, lie scattered across the leaves. Though usually light brown, the wet cones wear a hue closer to dark chocolate. Rivulets of water stream down the trunk, creating streaks of dark green where algae grows on the northern side. A flash of lightning flickers between the leaves. As I wait for the thunder, I feel hidden from the storm--as if it can't possibly "see" me here beneath the grand magnolia.

This is a familiar feeling; I've been hiding beneath magnolia trees by entire life.

The first southern magnolia I ever knew grew in the front yard of my childhood home in Raleigh. My parents planted it soon after they built our house in 1966. From the start the tree was destined to remain somewhat stunted because it was planted near a mature willow oak. It wasn't long before the oak's branches began stretching across the top of the young magnolia, blocking some of the sunlight. You see, magnolias are not really understory trees; they prefer to receive their sunlight full on. Even though the tree was small for its age, it grew in the normal fashion of magnolias. The lower branches reached for the ground, creating a cozy hiding place beneath the tree. After school, on Saturday mornings, whenever I felt the need for a secret hideaway close by, I found refuge under the magnolia in my front yard. It was there I read books, or peeked through the leaves at the neighbors passing by on our street, or mended the little wounds received during the course of childhood.

Over time, one forms a lifelong bond with a tree that offers this kind of shelter and companionship.

Fast forward twenty-five years to March, 2000. One morning I was walking our dog through the streets of our Carolina Beach neighborhood when I noticed a certain house for sale. My husband Terry and I called it the "Magnolia House," for it was surrounded by three gigantic magnolias. We made an offer on the house that very day. We moved in with our daughters two months later. Although we loved the house, I know we bought the property because of the magnolia trees.

Today I stand beneath the grand magnolia feeling safe from the winter thunderstorms of my life. Here, there exists a temporary refuge from worries about deadlines, my job, my grown children far away in California, my aging parents in Raleigh, the brevity of life. For a few moments I can listen to raindrops drumming on the dead leaves, the occasional passing car along the street, the sound of the departing thunderstorm now moving east and over the ocean.

When I was younger, my mother told me that when it thunders in winter, expect a snow flurry ten days later. I'm not going to stack the firewood on my porch just yet, but it's fun to imagine this southern weather myth coming true. Given that our house sits on an island between a river and an ocean, the moderating effects of the warmer water make snowflakes a rare occurrence. If and when snow does fall upon the grand magnolia, I'll be sure to watch for flakes from my secret room beneath the tree.