We are blessed at Passionflower to have great retail neighbors. Well sometimes it seems like a curse when you have this amazing antique shop called Pewter Rabbit Antiques right across the way from you.....this can be hard on the pocketbook....nonetheless, I love Shelley's store and we both seem to share a fondness for disintegrating objects......This is all a prologue to showing you this amazing magnolia bloom that was sitting on her front counter last week......
It was big and breathtaking and the browning petals looked almost like soft leather. I knew immediately - this is blog material.....so dear reader a short lesson in almost everything I know about magnolia.The beautiful bloom starts out on a tree like this one. This is a little tyke from my backyard weed patch/ wildflower meadow. Florists take note - magnolia grows many places but if you want those really fuzzy brown undersides it is best to make sure you're getting southern magnolia.
Then the tree gets a bud like this one.
My friend told me some native people in Mexico consider the flower like a sacred egg. They bring the bud inside, put their prayers into it and then when the flower blooms the prayer is let loose on the world.
That egg idea really makes sense to me on some intuitive level.
And they smell incredible. Kind of this musky citrus scent. Really unusual.
The geometry of this flower is amazing. Check out the curls on the end of those pollen bearing parts.
When I studied botany, way back when, they taught us that magnolia ( or something similiar) was one of the most ancient of flowers and that the first flowering plants were big and came from trees that had cones. You can almost see the cone forming on the inside of this flower. So in my non linear world magnolia = ancient egg that smells divine and is soft but looks tough like leather.
Magnolias are my favorite flower!
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