Blooming magnolia

Try to imagine my happiness this spring. Magnolias are one of my favourite flowers and now I’m living in the neighbourhood with at least a dozen magnificent trees.

It’s also worth mentioning that I can snap the photos, all day long without fear of being killed by angry mob :D Snap, snap, watching behind my shoulders… Ok, no pitchforks on the horizon.

It’s a true sense of freedom and tranquillity. It's priceless...

>  (html comment removed: [endif])The magnoliids with four orders, 19 families, and 8,500 species represent one of the largest clades of early diverging angiosperms, (link...)

The name “Magnolia” sounds very similar to the Latin word Magnus, big… It makes sense as the flowers are magnificent. However, it was named after Pierre MagnoPierre Magnol, French botanist from the XVII century.

Magnoliids are among the oldest flowering plants. As a kid, I used to daydream about my favourite dinosaurs peacefully chilling under the blossoms.

Although it looks fragile and gentile, there are fossilized flowers, 90 Million years old.

According to very precise fossil calibration, we can estimate that numerous fossils are even older than 100 Million years.

To give you some perspective, Primates emerged some 55 Million years ago.

During the last decade, we have learned more than ever before about the evolutionary relations in flowering plants thanks to DNA sequencing. In [this paper]( 326093823_Evolution_and_genetic_control_of_the_floral_ground_plan) you can find very nice family tree, and “blueprints for flower design”. [This paper]( https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/104/49/19369.full.pdf) is also very good in scientific terms, but the Figures are a bit less attractive. Notice how early the splitting occurred for Magnolias in comparison to Roses, for example.

(html comment removed: [if !supportLists])Ø  (html comment removed: [endif])Ancestral monocot flowers were confidently predicted to have only two whorls of free undifferentiated perianth organs, with three organs in each (trimery), two whorls of stamens with similar patterning, and three fused carpels.

Live long and prosperous. Aim towards something distant. Find a challenge, find a goal. Search for knowledge and achieve something extraordinary.  If those flowers managed to survive for 100 million years, I believe you can cope with challenges.