Seeds

Sunday afternoon I went back to the Bigleaf Magnolia tree and took a whole lot of pictures of the open flower that I had photographed in bud the day before. They are so beautiful, and it is rare to have a bloom close enough to the ground to get a picture of it. Many years ago, a friend of ours that owns a bucket truck brought it up here to get some photos of blooms from above.

Last fall, I collected as many of the seeds as I could reach, standing on the seat and fenders of the tractor. I must have collected 50 seeds. The treatment method is to place them in a covered container of water until they get a raunchy, rotten odor. The tissue on the outside is soft and mushy by then. With a stout pair of latex gloves, hold your nose and rinse the outer flesh off the seeds. Put the clean seeds in a damp paper towel in the crisper of the refrigerator. Label the bag very clearly as seeds, not to throw them away, and put a note to yourself as to when three months is up so you will remember to plant them. Trust that your spouse or kinfolk won’t “do you a favor” and clean out your crisper during the holiday seasons. When that happens I call it instant total crop failure.

I have a big pot planted with the seeds from last fall outside the back door, so I can see when the first seedling pops up. So far I have no sprouts, and I am beginning to worry that they are not coming up. I have another pot with some seeds from dwarf or one-flowered hawthorn that I treated the same way and they are coming up. I am kind of worried about what to do with them, and whether I will be able to transplant them without killing them. The plant is not common in the state. In fact, it has only been recorded from Caddo, Bienville, Winn, and Vernon Parishes. My plant, which is planted off the back porch of the Visitors Center here at Kalorama, is from Caddo Parish, where they were growing in pure sand. I made sure my plant had lots of sand, and it stays dry under the eaves. It is going to be hard to duplicate that scenario if I have a whole bunch of seedlings.

I spent the day with at a friend's house that lives up near the Arkansas state line. She had this fellow, a Little Blue Heron in breeding plumage, foraging around in the puddles in the front yard.