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.