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Marvelous Magnolias

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As part of my series on spring trees and shrubs, I thought it might be fun to take a deep dive into some of the many magnolias I’ve encountered during my garden travels over the past three-plus decades. As I said to someone, “I spend a lot of time writing about useful sparrows. Every now and then, I like to focus on the peacocks.”  And magnolias, like peacocks, were precious cargo for the earliest botanical explorers collecting seeds and cuttings from far-flung shores.

By the time Carl Linnaeus published Species Plantarum in 1753, thereby assigning binomials (two-word Latin names) to the known plants of the world, Pierre Magnol, the highly respected director of the botanical garden at Montpellier in southern France had been dead for thirty eight years. But Magnol had been honoured in 1703 by botanist Charles Plumier in the naming of a West Indies magnolia, M. dodecapetala. 

It was a time of discovery in the New World, as plant explorers visited the American colonies, sending back seeds and plants in Wardian cases. One of those explorers, Mark Catesby, travelled through Virginia and Carolina from 1722 to 1726, tramping through swampy woods and finding a magnificent tree with large, waxy, lemon-scented, white flowers which he called the Laurel Leaved Tulip Tree or Carolina Laurel. He made a preparatory drawing of the tree which came back with him to England in a trunk, along with drawings of many other plants and a few seeds and herbarium specimens. His drawings were the first Europeans had seen of plants and birds of North America. Some were repainted by other artists, then engraved as plates and published in ten parts from 1729-1748 in a collection called Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.  Thus was Catesby’s Laurel Tree of Carolina, Magnolia altissima, flore ingenti candido, later named simply Magnolia grandiflora by Linnaeus – memorialized in 1744 in the hand-coloured etching, below, by Georg Dionysius Ehret.

Today we know this beautiful species as southern magnolia. I found it in bloom in the Beatrix Farrand-designed landscape at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., now owned by Harvard University. I wrote a blog about my June 2017 visit to this spectacular garden.

Southern magnolia has made its way around the world, including an old specimen in the garden at Akaunui Farm Homestead in New Zealand, which I blogged about in 2018.  The tree grows 60-80 ft tall (18-24 m) and 30-40 ft (9-12 m) wide, though some in Mississippi have reached 120 ft (36 m) in height.

And it was on fragrant southern magnolia flowers near the beach in New Zealand where I found honey bees feverishly gathering pollen from the stamens.

Magnolias feature a cone-like aggregate fruit called a “follicetum”, like the one below from M. grandiflora.  

Magnolia ancestors are among the most primitive plants, having evolved in the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago) with the dinosaurs, and they ranged in places far from where we find them today.  Wrote John Fisher in The Origins of Garden Plants, “the climate in the northern hemisphere remained mild, and magnolias, bread fruit and camphor trees flourished on the west coast of Greenland – 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle.” This is a photo by Geology Professor James St. John shared under Creative Commons Attribution of a fossil leaf of extinct Magnolia boulayana, from the Cretaceous flora of Alabama, USA from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL.

Fossil leaf of Magnolia boulayana from the Cretaceous of Alabama – Field Museum, Chicago. Shared from Professor James St. John under Creative Commons

Though we cannot grow southern magnolia in Toronto, we can enjoy its leathery, bronze-backed leaves in winter arrangements like the ones below, on my back deck.

But Magnolia grandiflora was not the first American magnolia species to cross the Atlantic. The Bishop of London and head of the Anglican church in the American colonies, Henry Compton, had a garden at Fulham Palace and was an avid collector of rarities. He sent the missionary John Banister to Virginia in 1678; in the coming years, he would prepare a catalogue that represented the first survey of native American plants. One of his discoveries was the sweetbay,  Magnolia virginiana, with creamy scented flowers. It was used medicinally by the native Indian tribes of the southeast, who prepared decoctions to treat rheumatism, fever and consumption.  It would become the first of the genus to be successfully grown in Britain. I found M. virginiana ‘Green Shadow’ below, growing on New York’s High Line.   

I also found another native American magnolia on the High Line: M. macrophylla var. ashei, Ashe’s magnolia, below. Closely related to the taller bigleaf magnolia (M. macrophylla), it was named for William Willard Ashe (1872-1932) of the U.S. Forest Service. Though we often think of Dutch designer Piet Oudolf as a creator of four-season meadows, he is also skilled at using regionally native shrubs and trees for specific applications in his designs.

Beetles are considered to be the evolutionary pollinators of magnolias, since the plants evolved in the Cretaceous before bees appeared. But bees certainly take advantage of the flowers, as we see below with a native megachile leafcutter bee foraging on Ashe’s magnolia.

The only magnolia native to Canada – or at least the Carolinian Forest in extreme southern Ontario where it is listed as ‘endangered’ – is cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata var. acuminata).  Though it does not grow in the wild near me in Toronto, it is nonetheless hardy here and there is a lovely specimen in the 200-acre Mount Pleasant Cemetery, below. It is much smaller than its southern counterparts which can reach 80 ft (25 m).  Cucumber magnolia is morphologically variable, and the southern form, M. acuminata var. sub cordata, has been used in breeding with Asian magnolias to produce many of the highly prized yellow cultivars below.

The flowers of cucumber magnolia are unusual looking with green outer tepals cupped around yellow inner tepals. They close at night.

The tree gets its common name from the cucumber-like appearance of the unripe fruit, which turns red in late summer. 

Enter the Asian Magnolias

The first popular magnolia resulting from a 1956 cross of cucumber magnolia with the white-flowered Chinese Yulan magnolia (M. denudata) was called ‘Elizabeth’. Created by Dr. Evamaria Sberber at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden…..

…. its soft-yellow, precocious flowers (i.e.appearing before the leaves) marked a new chapter for magnolias.

But breeders wanted even brighter, longer-lasting yellows. This is the beautiful ‘Butterflies’, a 1990  cross of  M, acuminata ‘Fertile Myrtle’ x M. denudata ‘Sawada’s Cream’ by famed Michigan magnolia breeder Phil Savage.

My photos of  ‘Butterflies’, below, illustrate the reproductive strategy of magnolias. The flowers are protogynous, meaning the flowers open initially in the female phase during which the curved stigmas are receptive (top). They then close, only to reopen with the male reproductive organs, the pink-tipped stamens, ready to shed pollen (bottom). Magnolias evolved this system to improve the chance of cross-pollination, rather than self-pollination, thus strengthening the genetic diversity.

I have blogged previously about the wonderful yellow magnolias in the collection of the Montreal Botanical Garden – see “Mellow Yellow Magnolias” – so I won’t repeat myself here, other than to offer this montage of a selection of those beauties.


1- ‘Golden Sun’, 2 -‘Maxine Merrill’, 3-‘Banana Split’, 4-‘Yellow Bird’, 5-‘Golden Goblet’, 6-‘Sunburst’, 7-‘Limelight’, 8-‘Golden Endeavour’, 9 -‘Tranquility’

There are a number of hardy Asian magnolias for our climate (USDA Zone 5–Can. Zone 6), though their early flowering sometimes coincides with a spring frost. Native to Japan and Korea, the Kobushi magnolia, Magnolia kobus var. kobus, is a small tree or large shrub that grows 25-50 ft tall (8-15 m) with a wide spread. I have photographed specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery and at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, ON, below.

The white flowers of M. kobus are considered by some to be the most fragrant of the early magnolias. According to Helen Van Pelt Wilson and Léonie Bell in their book The Fragrant Year, the blooms distill “the ripe mango aroma of orange and pineapple softened by a note of lily, a perfume noticeable many yards away. Later the glossy leaves and gray twigs, crushed, have the spiciness of bayberry.”

The lovely star magnolia from Japan, Magnolia stellata, is related to M. kobus (some botanists consider it a variety) and a good choice as a tree or shrub for a small garden, given it usually doesn’t grow taller than 10 feet (3 m) with a spread of 15 feet (4.6 m). It bears at least 12 ribbon-like tepals, usually white but with natural variants such as var. rosea and var. rubra of pale rose to pink. When I was a young girl in the suburbs outside Vancouver, BC, my mother grew a star magnolia outside my bedroom window. It had a light perfume, one that Wilson and Bell describe as “watermelon or honeydew blended with Easter lily.”  

I photographed one of the more bizarre design uses for star magnolia one spring at Ontario’s Royal Botanical Garden in their “hedge plants” area. 

Ask most gardeners in the northeast what their favourite magnolia is and they’ll likely describe the ‘tulip tree’ or the ‘saucer magnolia’, both names for the widely available, hardy hybrid Magnolia x soulangeana.  Now almost two centuries old, it is reported to have appeared in 1826  in the garden of M. Soulange-Boudin at Fromont near Paris, an accidental cross between two Chinese species, the pure white Yulan,  M. denudata and the mulberry coloured Mulan, M. liliiflora.  On a well-grown shrub, those upturned rose-pink goblets are utterly enchanting in early spring, just when winter-weary gardeners are starved for beauty.

There are beautiful, mature specimens in Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery, usually flowering in mid-late April, the same time as the early Japanese cherries and native plums, depending on the season. The oldest specimens reach 15-20ft (4.6-6 m) with a large spread.  

I believe this is the cultivar M. x soulangeana ‘Lennei Alba’, introduced in 1931 by Terra Nova Nurseries in Holland.

Saucer magnolias can be found throughout the temperate world. I photographed ‘Verbanica’, below, an 1873 introduction from France at Van Dusen Botanical Garden on May 2, 2017. Note that its later flowering has also meant that the flowers are not ‘precocious’, i.e. the leaves have also emerged.

In warm climates, M. x soulangeana often flowers in winter. I photographed ‘Lilliputian’, below, bred  for its miniature form and flower size, at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 6, 2018.

Now for my personal favourites, the Loebner hybrids, so-named because they were first created in the early 1900s from crosses between the Japanese species Magnolia kobus and M. stellata by renowned German horticulturist Max Löbner (1869-1947).  The one I admire each spring at the Toronto Botanical Garden, below, is the white-flowered cultivar ‘Merrill’. It was grown from open-pollinated seed in 1939 by a student of research scientist and professor of genetics Karl Sax at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Sax named the cultivar in 1952 for the retiring Arboretum director Elmer Merrill, whom Sax would replace as director.

Unlike its slow-growing star magnolia parent, ‘Merrill’ grows quickly to a mature height of 20-30 ft (6-9 m), i.e. less than M. kobus.  The large, slightly fragrant flowers that appear on the bare branches are white flushed with pink, the tepals slightly broader than those of star magnolia. It is truly lovely.   

My other favourite Loebner hybrid is pink-flowered ‘Leonard Messel’.  An award-winning 1955 cross between M. kobus and M. stellata var. rosea from Nymans Garden in Sussex, England, home of the Messel family, this cultivar has more of star magnolia’s dainty appearance, its pink, ribbon-like tepals fluttering in the breeze.  At the Toronto Botanical Garden, there are two shrubs, including this one in a sheltered corner on an inner terrace.

I have been known to spend long minutes focusing on the enchanting blooms……

….. that emerge like floral Cinderellas from the fuzzy brown winter buds.  

There are also a few ‘Leonard Messel’ magnolias at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, growing in relatively unprotected sites.

Now for the bad news:  f-r-e-e-z-i-n-g.  Unlike plants adapted to growing in sub-zero climates, Japanese magnolias hail from mountain regions where their flowering is timed with the onset of mild spring temperatures.  In Ontario, you can have an early spring in March that teases open magnolias, then snows on them, as it did with M. x soulangeana at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in April 2002…

….. or turns those March 2012 ‘Merrill’ flowers in my photo above to brown mush four days later. So a little caveat emptor is in order with magnolias.

The Oyama magnolia, Magnolia sieboldii, with its bright red stamens made its way quite dramatically from Japan to Europe with the German botanist and doctor, Philipp Franz von Siebold, physician to the Governor of the Dutch East India Company.  An eye surgeon who could remove cataracts, he had arrived in 1823 and therefore initially found popularity with government officials. He lived with his Japanese mistress with him he had a child and gardened with his newly found plants on the man-made port island of Dejima in Nagasaki prefecture. But when it was discovered that he had procured maps of the mainland, he was charged with espionage and imprisoned for a year. He was expelled in 1830 and was permitted to take his plants with him (including Hosta plantaginea, Corylopsis spicata, Clematis florida var. sieboldii, Fatsia japonica, Hamamelis japonica), but left his mistress and child behind. If this sounds like a fairytale, in fact Puccini’s 1904 opera ‘Madama Butterfly’ is based on von Siebold’s travails. As for Magnolia sieboldii, it is a beautiful small (10 ft – 3 m) woodland shrub for light shade and marginally hardy in Toronto where I have photographed it in June, but it thrives in milder parts of Canada.

The ‘Girl’ Series of hybrid magnolias were developed in 1955-56 at the U.S. National Arboretum by William F. Kosar and Dr. Francis de Vos.  They involved crosses of one of two of the Magnolia lilliflora  (the Mulan or woody orchid magnolia) cultivars ‘Nigra’ (below) and ‘Reflorescens’ and one of two Magnolia stellata cultivars ‘Rosea’ (var rosea) and ‘Waterlily’.

The resulting sterile hybrids, released in 1968, were named for the daughters of Kosar (‘Betty’) and de Vos (‘Ann’, ‘Judy’, ‘Randy’, ‘Ricki’); the daughter of Arboretum director Henry Skinner (‘Susan’); and the wife of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman (‘Jane’).  Flowering 2-4 weeks later than M. stellata and M. x soulangeana, they are less at risk from late spring frost that will damage the flowers. Of the ones I’ve included below in this blog, ‘Ricki’ and ‘Ann’ are the shortest (10-12 ft or 3-3.6 m) with a 16-ft (4.8 m) width; ‘Jane’ is the tallest at 20-25 ft (6-7.6 m) with a 20-ft (6 m) width.  ‘Ann’, below, which I photographed at the U.S. National Arboretum is the earliest-flowering; ‘Jane’ is latest; the rest are midseason. 

 ‘Betty’ shows the upswept tepals of parent M. liliiflora.  It is a rounded, multi-stemmed shrub.

‘Susan’ sports twisted tepals; it is slightly fragrant.

The abundant tepals of ‘Ricki’ with their white interior hint at its M. stellata parentage.

Finally, here’s ‘Jane’ towards the end of her flowering period; unlike the others, her open blossoms recall the form of her parent M. stellata ‘Waterlily’.  

On an April 2008 trip to Ireland to find my grandfather’s ancestral home in the countryside near Banbridge (see my musical blog titled ‘Galway Bay’), we visted the National Botanic Garden, Glasnevin near Dublin where I found the magnificent Magnolia ‘Galaxy’ at on April 26, 2008. A late-flowering, tree-form magnolia with upward branching and a mature height of 30-40 ft (9-12 m), it is a 1963 cross between Magnolia liliiflora ‘Nigra’ and M. sprengeri ‘Diva’.  Like the ‘Girl’ Series, it was developed at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington DC in 1963 and released in 1980.  

I love to visit Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Gardens in spring; it’s where my mother and I would go to get our floral fix when I travelled ‘home’ from Toronto to visit her. There is so much to see there, I wrote a 2-part blog called ‘Spring at Van Dusen Botanical Garden’. One of the highlights is their magnolia collection, including Magnolia ‘Star Wars’, below, which I photographed on May 2, 2017. It was bred in New Zealand by Oswald Blumhardt, one of New Zealand’s renowned magnolia breeders. It’s a cross between Magnolia campbellii and M. liliiflora, bearing large, sweetly-scented flowers.

I photographed another New Zealand-bred magnolia at Van Dusen on May 2nd. This is ‘Apollo’, a Felix Jury cross between M. campbellii subsp. mollicomata ‘Lanarth’ and M. liliiflora ‘Nigra’. It is said to have a fruity fragrance but the flowers were too high for me to sniff.    

And finally, on Van Dusen’s Rhododendron Walk on that same May day, I found a stunning specimen of evergreen Magnolia cavalerei var. platypetala from China (formerly Michelia).  The fragrance was wonderful.

In 2019, I visited lovely Darts Hill Park Garden Park in South Surrey, outside Vancouver, B.C.  It is the home of the late plantswoman Francisca Darts (1916-2012) whom I was lucky to meet with my mom, Mary Healy, at the right below, one rainy spring day long ago.  I’m including this photo because my mother loved magnolias, she died the same year as Francisca, and she would be tickled pink to know that they are featured together under all these magnificent specimens.

During my 2019 visit to Darts Hill, I was interested to find Magnolia officinalis in flower, below.  Discovered originally in Sechuan, China in 1869 by French Abbé Henry David (of Davidia fame), it was found again as a cultivated plant in flower in 1900 by British plant explorer Ernest Henry Wilson who collected seeds that autumn to send to his then-employers at Veitch Nursery.  As he wrote later:  “The Chinese designate this species the Hou-p’o tree, and its bark and flower-buds constitute a valued drug which is exported in quantity from central and western China to all parts of the Empire. It is for its bark and flowerbuds that the tree is cultivated. The removal of’ the bark causes the death of the tree and this would account for its disappearance from the forests. The bark when boiled yields an extract which is taken internally as a cure for coughs, colds and as a tonic and stimulant during the convalescence. A similar extract obtained from the flower-buds, which are called Yu-p’o is esteemed as a medicine for women.”  Bark from the tree is used in Chinese medicine to this day.

I will finish this long wander through the hardy Magnolias with two recent arrivals, having been transferred there taxonomically from the former genus Michelia after genetic sequencing determined that Magnolioideae should contain only one genus. Included in that are 210 species of magnolias from around the world.  I found Magnolia laevifolia, formerly Michelia yunnanensis, at the San Francisco Botanical Garden (then Strybing Arboretum) one March long ago.

And though it was a little too bright at the Los Angeles County Arboretum on January 28, 2018 for good photos, I was delighted to find fragrant Magnolia doltsopa ‘Silver Cloud’ (formerly Michelia) in flower. 

As I gaze out the window in Toronto on this March day, winter is still holding on with a freshly-fallen blanket of heavy, wet snow. But spring is surely just around the corner – and with it, those spectacular floral peacocks, the magnolias.

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Anxious for spring, too? See my recent blogs on tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera),  redbuds (Cercis canadensis and its cousins), and the many native northeast maples.  

Walla Walla’s Abeja Inn and Winery

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After our big day of geology at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument and the wonderful Thomas Condon Paleontology Center in Oregon, (click on the link for my last blog), we arrived a few hours later at the Abeja Inn and Winery in Walla Walla, Washington. This was our big splurge for our British Columbia-Washington-Oregon road trip, and we were going to enjoy it.

We were two hours late for our wine-tasting (blame geology!) but the lovely receptionist told us it would be no problem to switch the appointment to the following morning…. after breakfast! She said this as she poured us a delicious glass of wine, which tasted extra special after a long day amidst fossils and volcanic ash flows!

With a friendly guide pointing out the property’s features, we walked past the entrance with its big allée of maple trees….

…. and headed towards the house. Goldenrod was in bloom and the mountain ash was loaded with fruit.

Lavender plants had bloomed earlier and had their summer shearing.

The inn occupies the original Kibler family farmhouse from the early 1900s.  But for almost 20 years, the property has been owned by Ken and Ginger Harrison, who developed the winery after searching for a property where they could grow Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.

There was a spacious veranda….

…. where rose-of-sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) in full flower.

I loved this wire plant stand – maybe a defensive accessory against plant-loving rabbits?

The view of the vineyard from the sitting area down the hall from our room was gorgeous, as was our room!

Grape vines and grain fields did look lovely in the late afternoon light. I read somewhere that local farmers are getting anxious because more grape-growers are moving into the area and transforming farm land into vineyards. Having tasted some pretty delicious (and expensive) Walla Walla reds, I could understand the appeal of the terroir but sympathized with the concern of long-time grain farmers. The same thing happened to fruit growers in Ontario’s Niagara regions – out with the peaches, in with the Cabernet Sauvignon.

There was a comfy living room for reading, but we were ready for dinner, having snacked for lunch on last night’s meagre deli supper ingredients in the car on the highway through Oregon.

Saffron Restaurant was on the main street of Walla Walla, and was every bit as lovely and delicious as we’d read.

The next morning dawned crisp and a little cool, and we headed to the breakfast patio.

But first I wanted to tour the beautiful garden….

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…….. with its central fountain…..

…. and late-season perennials and shrubs.

It was a lovely place to stop and “smell the roses”.

We decided to find a little nook out of the wind so…..

…. took a corner table where we were served the most scrumptious waffle with blackberry preserves and peach cream….

….. and then a delicious shirred egg with herbs.

After breakfast we toured a little of the property. Check out the big trumpet vine.

It was grape harvest time and the vats were being readied.

We walked past the vineyards, netted to prevent birds….

….. from eating succulent grapes like these 2018 Syrah.

Then it was time for our 10:30 am WINE TASTING!  No, I didn’t drink and Doug took small sips. (After all, when in Rome….)

We learned that Abeja means “bee” in Spanish, which translates to some interesting themed gifts in the shop.

I had already noticed bees on the butterfly bush. (And of course as part of my work I photograph all kinds of bees wherever I am in the world).

But we had a big drive ahead with a stop at a very special destination (next blog!) and we walked pack to the lovely old farmhouse inn and packed up. Thank you Abeja!

Oregon’s Thomas Condon Paleontology Center

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The morning after our visit to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (JODA), we had a $5 bacon-and-eggs breakfast at the Sidewalk Cafe in Mitchell, then packed our bags and drove away from The Oregon Hotel.

Soon we were driving east from Mitchell (#1, below) on Highway 26 towards Highway 19 and our destination, the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center (TCPC) at Sheep Rock (#2), the second of the three units of JODA. (Click on the photo to see a larger version.) Sadly, we didn’t have time to include John Day’s third area of interest, the Clarno Unit, which features the in situ fossils. Our ultimate destination that day was a one-night splurge at the Inn at Abeja in Walla Walla (#3) about 207 miles away via Highways 395 and 11, where my husband had booked a 3 pm wine-tasting. We didn’t make our appointment (blame geology and highway work) but re-booked it for the following morning (coming up in my next blog!)

It was fine weather on September 10, 2018 and I was enjoying…….

…… sending back jokey phone shots to my friends on Facebook. Might as well get some value out of those roaming fees!  You can see the reddish-brown, wedding-cake palisades of the…..

….. Picture Gorge Basalts in these photos.  “Picture Gorge”, for all its importance in defining a large lava flood, seems a little elusive as to physical definition. It is usually pinpointed on maps as just north of Highway 26 on Highway 19, i.e. very near to this location. So it was fortuitous that I asked my husband to pull over at this spot on the highway where the volcanic rock was beautifully exposed. It recalled for me John McPhee’s writings in Annals of the Former World about road cuts like this one yielding vital information for geologists.

At this point we saw that the basalt has been tilted and mashed up (using very un-geological terminology), but a few yards further on…..

…… we saw the basalt as it was originally formed into hexagonal columns (columnar basalt) while cooling slowly after a geographically local eruption in what geologists include as the “Picture Gorge Basalt Flood” in the Columbia River Basalt Flood (CRBF) event. As defined in Wikipedia, “a flood basalt is the result of a giant volcanic eruption or series of eruptions that covers large stretches of land or the ocean floor with basalt lava”. The broader geologic category covering basalt flood events is a Large Igneous Province (LIP), meaning areas greater than 100,000 square kilometres (38,600 square miles) that occurred within a short geologic time, a few million years. (If you remember your three types of rock from elementary school, “igneous” rock forms from lava or magma.) In this part of western North America, the Columbia Plateau between the Cascade Range and the Rocky Mountains of Washington, Oregon and Idaho is a depression of 160,000 square kilometres (63,000 square miles) formed by successive lava flows. During the CRBF event between 16.6 – 15Ma (Ma = mega annum = million years), massive amounts of magma erupted as basaltic lava (thought to have been fed by the same slowly-moving hot spot that triggered the Yellowstone super-volcano). The CRBF covers seven formations, including the one we’re travelling through: the Picture Gorge Basalt Flood. Beneath Yakima, Washington, the basalt is 15,000 feet thick. Here in the Picture Gorge, it’s about 1,000 feet thick. Got all that?

Less than an hour after leaving Mitchell, we were on the newly-paved highway through Picture Gorge leading to the TCPC. We stopped to photograph pinnacled Sheep Rock with its patchwork formations.

Sheep Rock is 3360 feet (1024 metres) and gives its name to the larger area around it. According to the US Geological Survey, “The Sheep Rock unit contains an amalgam of colorful strata and complex geology. From Cretaceous conglomerates to the flood basalts, the geologic features in this portion of the monument are a spectacle to behold. The predominant exposures of green rock seen on Sheep Rock are a multitude of reworked layers of volcanic ash. The rich green color of the claystone was caused by chemical weathering of a mineral called celadonite. This happened millions of years ago as water moved through the alkaline ash beds under high pressure.”

We stopped further down the road so I could photograph it with the eponymous John Day River in the foreground. If we hadn’t been pressed for time, it would have been good to explore the Sheep Rock Unit for a few hours, since there are trails here with startling blue and green formations and visible fossils, including Cathedral Rock and Blue Basin.  You can see some of the other features in this blog.

But time was marching so we were soon parked at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center.  Mandated in the 1975 legislation that established JODA, it was opened in 2005.

We walked past a chunk of 40-million-year-old petrified wood in the parking lot. This was going to be fun!

The center was named for Oregon’s first state geologist. Born in Ireland in 1822, Thomas Condon immigrated to New York with his family as a child. He became a school teacher then entered a Presbyterian seminary. Like many young educated men of his era Condon was also interested in natural history and collected fossils as a hobby. After moving to Oregon as a missionary, he and his wife later moved to The Dalles as minister of the Congregational church where one pioneer later remembered “that peculiar smile wreathed about his face when he spoke, the tender manner in which he handled the bones and rocks, his quaint manner that is indescribable. He read truths in God’s books of sand and stone.” When the soldiers in his congregation began bringing him specimens from the John Day area, his interested was piqued and in 1865 he travelled into the region with an army patrol. He sent the fossils he collected to eminent paleontologists for identification, and soon experts from Yale, Princeton and the University of California were writing Condon to request specimens (many new to science), or visiting the site themselves. At 49 he published a paper on Oregon’s geological past and gave a series of popular lectures on geology in Portland. In 1870, his first discovery was published by University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Joseph Leidy.

In 1872 Thomas Condon was named Oregon’s first state geologist; the following year, he resigned his church position to become a professor at Pacific University. Three years later, he moved to the new University of Oregon, below, where he taught for almost 20 years until his death in 1907. It’s a mark of his early influence that “by 1900 over 100 papers had been published on the geology and paleontology of the John Day basin”, according to the center.

In fact, the John Day Basin was the first site to help scientists understand the historic global context in which fossils appeared in rock strata. Said John C. Merriam who led many expeditions to the region for the University of California in the early 1900s: “By observing the distinctive characteristics of the layers and of the associated forms of life, we discover the record of amazing series of changes in the appearance of the country through a period so vast that relatively man’s sojourn on the earth seems no longer than the click of a camera shutter.” One of the young scientists who visited John Day with Merriam was Ralph Weeks Chaney (1890-1971), far right in the upper photo below.  A geologist, paleobotanist and ecologist, his collections helped to define the Tertiary flora (66-2.6Ma*) of ancient Oregon. At 35, he had published papers on the local Mascall 15Ma (see later in this blog) and Bridge Creek Flora 33Ma. At 41, he was named Professor of Paleontology at Berkeley and Curator of Paleobotany and Museum Paleobotanist at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

I would not connect the photo above with the photo below until a year later, i.e. right now, as I did my research on the region. When Chaney worked on the fossils of the Bridge Creek flora in the 1920s, specimens like the one below were initially identified as fossil Sequoia. But in 1941, a Japanese paleobotanist named Shigeru Miki found fossils of a conifer believed to be extinct in clay beds at Hondo on Kyushu. Because it looked like a sequoia in many respects but was not, he named the fossil Metasequoia. Then in 1944, a young Chinese forester named Zhang Wang went to a town called Mou-tao-chi in a valley in Hupei Province and collected branches and cones of a conifer that was thought to be a common Chinese species, the water-pine (Glyptostrobus pensilis). It was later determined to be an undiscovered species that matched the fossils found in Japan five years earlier: the dawn redwood. In 1947, collections of seed were financed by Dr. E.D. Merrill of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, who sent them to botanical gardens throughout the world. Ralph Chaney, through his own communications with the Chinese geologist Hsen Hsu Hu, learned about the new species at the same time, and suspected it might be the same “sequoia” fossil he had studied in the John Day Region. Accompanied by Dr. Milton Silverman, science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, he travelled to Hupei in 1948; together they made an arduous 10-day trip into the region (one of Chaney’s 9 collecting trips in Asia), later leaving China with seeds and four small seedlings of dawn redwood.  (If you’re not bored to death yet, there are layers of intrigue and professional misunderstanding in the Metasequoia saga, as described in this 2016 story in Landscape Architecture Magazine.)

Ralph Paley wrote his own story about the trip (which would overturn significant parts of North American taxonomy as nine fossil Sequoia taxa were renamed Metasequoia), which is included in a 1998 edition of Harvard’s Arnoldia. At the end is an epilogue on his return to the U.S. with the samples he had collected. “Chaney himself brought back seeds and four seedlings from China. Concerned that his prizes might be taken from him by customs in Hawaii, he tucked the seeds and twigs into an inner pocket and requested intercession for the seedlings from a former student at the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Word did not reach the inspector at Plant and Economic quarantine in Honolulu, however, and he demanded that the four seedlings be handed over for incineration. Chaney’s protestations that the trees were priceless, more than a million years old, were of no avail. According to Milton Silverman, the ensuing argment grew louder and louder until Chaney, close to hysteria, was shouting defiantly and citing, ‘millions of years, tens of millions of years, a hundred million years’. Suddenly the agitated inspector asked a question: ‘Are they more than a hundred and fifty years old?’ And so, officially declared antiques, the seedlings continued their journey to California”. Ralph Chaney would grow dawn redwood in his “Tertiary garden” in Berkeley, in a collection marking 100 million years of geologic time. I made the photo below in the Sarah Duke Garden at Duke University in North Carolina.

Oregon was so proud of the renaming that it declared dawn redwood its state fossil.

A fossil species of hornbeam from 33Ma is in the center’s collection, below. It is named Paracarpinus chaneyi after its discoverer. The maple fossil Acer chaneyi is also named for Ralph Chaney. These ancient ancestors of our modern-day trees, including katsura, elm and alder – and of course dawn redwood – are displayed in the Bridge Creek Flora section of the TCPC.

The Bridge Creek Flora was collected in the spectacular Painted Hills Unit of JODA, which I wrote about in my previous blog.

I loved the colourful displays showing an imagined scene from the Bridge Creek era some 33 million years ago (Oligocene). Check out the “painted hills” stripe in the wall.

But the Bridge Creek Flora is not the oldest formation in the region. As you can see on the interesting display below, that honour goes to the the Clarno Nut Beds which make up the third unit of JODA (which alas we did not have time to explore).

The Clarno Formation is made up of volcanic mudflows called “lahars” that formed 54-40 million years ago, engulfing the forest and its plant and animal inhabitants. Fossils are visible in the cliff walls here.

The Clarno Nut Beds contain 76 species of wood, more wood than any other fossil assemblage in the world, including ancient relatives of walnut, chestnut, oak, sycamore, maple, linden, dogwood and meliosma.  The region was a semi-tropical forest in which grew ancient forms of cycad, palm, avocado, banana, grape and horsestail.  Because of the sudden nature of the formation, there are even rare fossil assemblages of leaves, wood and fruit in the Clarno, below.

The Hancock Mammal Quarry 40Ma is part of the Clarno Strata. From the interpretive signage: “Within the depths of the Clarno Strata is a layer of volcanic sediments deposited by a river. Seasonal flooding swept a large variety of dead animals and plants to an existing point bar. A point bar forms when  sediments such as silt, clay, sand and gravel drops out as water rounds a bend and loses energy, building up a spit of land. With each successive flood, more sediment layers were added.” Animal species in this semi-tropical forest included wolf-like creodonts, tapir-like hyracyus, and rhino-like herbivorous brontotheres.

This is the tusk of an amynodont, a marsh rhinoceros.

 

The next younger formations after The Bridge Creek Flora above are The Turtle Cove 29Ma, the Kimberly 24Ma and the Haystack Valley 20Ma. These four formations are referred to as the John Day Strata and yield more fossils than any other area at JODA. By the late Kimberly and Haystack Valley, the climate here had cooled down and dried out. The Haystack Valley assemblages are found in the youngest rock before the Picture Gorge Basalt Flood.  Grasses and grazers were now on the scene.

The Picture Gorge Basalt Floods 16Ma occurred as a series of molten lava floods streamed over the land like icing on a cake. As it cools, basalt (pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, like “assault”) forms polygonal columns, often hexagonal. These are seen throughout the world, especially here in Oregon. The most famous is the Giant’s Causeway 55Ma on the Antrim Coast in Ireland. I was there in 2008, below, when I visited my grandfather’s childhood home.

Basalts with their incredible temperatures exclude fossils. Once the Picture Gorge Basalt flows ceased, life returned to the region, as illustrated in the beautiful mural by Roger Witter, below. A moderate climate along with abundant rainfall and fertile volcanic soil encouraged the growth of mixed deciduous forests and lush grasses. Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) surrounded lakes and replaced dawn redwood. Hoofed animals appeared, including six types of horses, camelids and peccaries. True cats crossed over from Asia, along with elephant-like gomphotheres. The Mascall Formation 15Ma is 290 metres (950 feet thick) and consisted of several broad basins with lakes and meandering streams that formed atop the last of the basalt flows. They were later covered with successive layers of ash from volcanoes to the west and much closer Strawberry Mountain volcanics. Alternating between the layers of tuff (volcanic ash) are siltstones and sandstones related to stream deposits.

Among the fauna in the formation are birds, turtles, fish and 33 species of mammals, mostly found in the Mascall Tuff, including an early mastodon called Zygolophodon, whose molars are shown below.

For 8 million years, life in the region was peaceful. Then, as the NPS says:  “Life in the Rattlesnake came to an abrupt end seven million years ago as a stratovolcano in the Harney Basin (near current-day Burns) erupted, as pictured in the mural below (by Roger Witter). Tephra was expelled from the mouth of the volcano, coming down like a fiery hail on the land. The eruption created a pyroclastic flow which attained speeds over 400 mph and spewed hot, ashy gas that reached nearly 1,800 °F. This event caused nearly 13,000 square miles of Eastern Oregon to be covered in an ashy tuff that destroyed everything in its path.” Known as the Rattlesnake Ignimbrite or the Rattlesnake Ash Flow Tuff (RAFT), it is the youngest major formation in the area and forms the dark red cap atop certain mountains, but is largely eroded in much of the region.  However, we would soon be seeing remants of the RAFT at a nearby viewpoint of the Mascall Formation.

As we made our way out, I stopped at an interpretive display featuring an impressive evolutionary record of the horse from 54Ma to 5Ma.
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A display case showed the fossil-collector’s tools. More than 45,000 fossils are now in the John Day collection.

Another display showed how fossils are prepared.

Then we were outside with that spectacular view of Sheep Rock.

But who was this?  Yes…. proponents of ‘Intelligent Design’, below, were sitting right outside a secular government building.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Despite what the majority of scientists think about mixing God with creation, Thomas Condon squared his own faith with paleontology: “The Hills from which these evidences were taken“, he wrote in reference to the evolutionary record of the fossil beds, “were made by the same God who made the hills of Judea, and the evidences are as authoritative. The Church has nothing to fear from the uncovering of  truth.” Unsurprisingly, for an ordained minister contemporaneous with Charles Darwin, he had given the matter some thought.

And what do I think? Well, I’ll just insert this little clue here….

******

At the risk of courting a little controversy… while writing this blog I looked at the online version of the Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlet “Was Life Created”.  In a series of questions and answers, the viewer is encouraged to think of the verses of the bible as a kind of moral support that the creation of the universe and its creatures could not have come about as the result of natural forces and unguided evolution. Here’s a bit of it:

“Many who believe in evolution assert that God does not exist or that he will not intervene in human affairs. In either case, our future would rest in the hands of political, academic, and religious leaders. Judging from the past record of such men, the chaos, conflict, and corruption that blight human society would continue. If, indeed, evolution were true, there would seem to be ample reason to live by the fatalistic motto: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we are to die.” (1 Corinthians 15:32) By contrast, the Bible teaches: “With [God] is the source of life.” (Psalm 36:9) These words have profound implications. If what the Bible says is true, life does have meaning. Our Creator has a loving purpose that extends to all who choose to live in accord with his will. (Ecclesiastes 12:13) That purpose includes the promise of life in a world free of chaos, conflict, and corruption—and even free of death.(Psalm 37:10, 11; :Isaiah 25:6-8)  With good reason, millions of people around the world believe that learning about God and obeying him give meaning to life as nothing else can! (John 17:3) Such a belief is not based on mere wishful thinking. The evidence is clear—life was created.”

That kind of circular logic to arrive at a rationale for putting creation in the divine hands of an Intelligent Designer is astonishing to me. However, more liberal versions of the creationism concept run throughout organized religions and even among people who don’t practice religion, but feel there “must be some cause” or “reason” why we’re here. Even long after the idea of a 6,000-year old universe created in 6 days was jettisoned in the face of fossil discoveries that proved earth was much, much, older, most of the faithful still believe that the notion of a god-created universe is more comforting than the truly frightening concept of not knowing the “why” we are here, even if we can work out the “how”.

I do have a bible, as it happens – a high school reminder of the life of faith I lived for 50 years, beginning with my christening as an infant, my attendance at parochial schools, the baptism of my own three children, and decades spent in thoughtful prayer in churches and cathedrals.  I am now 72 and I have lived purposefully without faith for more than two decades. I no longer believe in God or deities. I am an atheist. In my personal library are books as illuminating to me as the bible is to its most fervent adherents. They were my way of deprogramming myself but also of understanding the scientific facts about our universe and its “creation”. For this blog, I’ll just look at five of them from the photo below that bear on this discussion.

 

  1. Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection – 1st Edition (1859)
  2. David Quammen – The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006)
  3. Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene (1976)
  4. Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998)
  5. Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion (2008)

1) Darwin’s magnum opus changed everything. It became the foundation of evolutionary biology. When The Origin of Species was published in 1859 Thomas Condon was still working as a missionary in Oregon; three years later he would have his own congregation in the Dalles. In England, as Wiki says: “Natural history at that time was dominated by clerical naturalists whose income came from the Established Church of England and who saw the science of the day as revealing God’s plan.” Charles Darwin, after decades of his own experiments and research, including five years as naturalist on HMS Beagle, had also communicated extensively with other scientists, including the pioneering Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, “who demonstrated the power of existing natural causes in explaining Earth history.” Darwin acknowledged Lyell’s work in The Origin. “He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.” Yet, much to Darwin’s disappointment, Charles Lyell, like Thomas Condon, struggled “to square his natural beliefs with evolution”. (Wiki)

2) Why did it take Charles Darwin 20 years to find the courage to publish his findings? Why was he so reluctant to share the idea that species are “mutable”? Perhaps for the same reason that Thomas Condon felt the need to defend paleontology as perfectly aligned with his faith. Darwin knew, in his core, that his theory would conceivably negate the God of Creation in Genesis that so many of his contemporaries took as fact. David Quammen’s book explores the mid-19th century environment in England in which Darwin worked and his own personal qualms at publishing, including his relationship with his very Christian wife, Emma.

3) The photo of me with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, above, contains a jokey reference to his seminal 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which described the gene as the evolutionary survival machine, a process he explains in this video. As to the photo, we were photographed at a fundraiser breakfast in Toronto put on by the Centre for Inquiry Canada. It was the morning after the Hot Docs Festival gala screening of The Unbelievers, which I had also attended, about the campaign by Dawkins and his colleague, partical physicist Lawernce Krauss to fight for a wider acceptance of atheism. (You can watch the entire documentary here.)

4) In Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins writes his own response to the Romantic poet William Keats who objected to Isaac Newton’s scientific deconstruction of the magic of a rainbow into prismatic hues. In this video, Dawkins expands on that with the first beautiful verses of his book.

5) After authoring numerous scholarly books and papers on evolutionary biology, Richard Dawkins took on organized religion in this stunning book, which won him as much criticism as it did praise. It was time to take a very public stand and carry the flag for atheism, to accomplish very concrete things such as enabling those with no declared religion to run for office in the U.S. without hiding their atheism or agnosticism. You can glean his intent in this brief video summary of the point of the intent of The God Delusion on BBC4.

Finally, do I think Thomas Condon’s reverence for the “hills of Judea” has any special significance? Of course I do. As Wikipedia says (and I have no reason to doubt it): “The Judaean Mountains are the surface expression of a series of monoclinic folds which trend north-northwest through Israel. The folding is the central expression of the Syrian Arc belt of anticlinal folding that began in the Late Cretaceous Period in northeast Africa and southwest Asia. The Syrian Arc extends east-northeast across the Sinai, turns north-northeast through Israel and continues the east-northeast trend into Syria. The Israeli segment parallels the Dead Sea Transform lies just to the east. The uplift events that created the mountain occurred in two phases one in the Late Eocene-Early Oligocene and second in the Early Miocene. In prehistoric times, animals no longer found in the Levant region were found here, including elephants, rhinoceri, giraffes and wild Asian water buffalo. The range has karst topography including a stalactite cave in Nahal Sorek National Park between Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh and the area surrounding Ofra, where fossils of prehistoric flora and fauna were found. In ancient times the Judean mountains were the allotment of the Tribe of Judah and the heartland of the former Kingdom of Judah.”  (I’m assuming those last two Wikipedia “facts” are Thomas Condon’s biblical point of reference.)

*******

Well, that was quite the detour. Back to our road trip now. We drove south from TCPC to Highway 26 and turned east towards the town of John Day. A little later, we turned onto a rustic road leading to the spectacular Mascall Overlook. I think this is quite a new feature, and definitely worth taking time to do……

…. because the view is simply thrilling. An interpretive sign dramatizes the sudden, terrifying cause of the Rattlesnake Formation and the resulting ignimbrite formation: “Imagine standing at the bottom of a long mountain valley, here, just over seven million years ago. A lush blanket of grass covers the length of the valley…… Nearby,four-tusked elephants graze playfully, ignoring a passing hyena hunting prey. The sound of munching grass comes from a wary herd of horses. Suddenly, a distant thundering explosion shakes the land. Birds burst from the grasses into the sky. Soon, the inhabitants settle down, as you wonder about the source of the explosion. Less than an hour later, the valley to the east quickly fills with a glowing tidal wave of fiery volcanic ash, gases and debris. This onrushing cloud of death flows down the valley toward you at high speed, engulfing and incinerating all life. It is well you were not here. Successive ashfalls from the volcanic eruption, 80 miles to the south, covered the region. A fiery deposit, an ignimbrite, settled into that ancient valley bottom. The mountains and hills that held that valley have since eroded down, leaving the hard, resistant ignimbrite and valley bottom high in the sky.” If you were an ancient Roman, this could be the god Vulcan enacting his wrath. An early Christian might indeed consider this spectacle of “fire and brimstone” as hell on earth.  But science knows it was the release of liquid magma from the magma chamber underlying the region. A tiny blip in the dramatic chronicle of earth science.

It’s the stunning panorama that takes your breath here, of the fanned Mascall formation……

….. and that iron-oxidized ignimbrite (ash tuff) layer capping the ridge (which is why it’s called caprock here) which would have formed the fiery layer 7 million years ago, before erosion carved out this valley.

For that I needed my zoom lens.

With that, we took our leave of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, driving east on Highway 26 over the John Day River towards…..

…. Highway 395 north. We drove up alongside the North Fork John Day River on the Ukiah-Dale Scenic Corridor through the Ulmatilla Forest, always aware of the tiers of columnar basalt decorating the hills like layered frosting.

The highway twisted over hills and through valleys….

…. and forest fire remnants that were far enough in the past to allow what I believe are red  huckleberries (Vaccinium parvifolium) to grow in the charred earth, their colours reddening as autumn neared.

This would be our last view of a creek forming a tributary of the John Day River, because…..

….. we were heading north into farm country along Highway 395, then Highway 11 into Walla Walla.

On September 10th, the grain was golden and the sky was dramatic.

Wire fences snaked across rolling farm hills like delicate embroidery.

It was comforting to see the 16-million-year-old basalt peeking out of the highway shoulders here and there.

We weren’t always alone in the rolling hills.

As we veered slightly northeast onto Highway 11, the hay bales were piled six-high…..

….. and grain elevators dotted the landscape.

At 5:02 pm, we pulled into Walla Walla. We were 2 hours late for our wine-tasting at the nearby inn, but there would be wine for us anyway in our lovely room (next blog). Because although we had started our day just eight hours earlier in the little town of Mitchell, it felt like we’d been awake for 44 million years.

A Lunch at Ostler Wine’s Vineyard

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One of the logistical tasks for a tour guide in a country where the attractions are far-flung is to find a place to feed the tour members lunch. In New Zealand, our guide Richard Lyon accomplished this necessary detail with great panache. We had eaten lunch in some of the most beautiful gardens in the country, so we were excited as we drove from Oamaru through the Waitaki River Valley, past the power plant at Waitaki Lake……


….. to arrive moments later at the beautiful vineyard of Ostler Wine……


….. and the home of Jim and Ann Jerram, where we would have the opportunity to sample delicious wines……

…… and lunch on a catered feast, including this beautiful rice salad…..

……. with pretty bouquets of fresh garden flowers…….

….. while gazing at a spectacular new garden filled with native plants. What could be better?

We listened to Jim Jerram, a retired physician, discuss his mission to create memorable wines from the ‘heartbreak grape’, Pinot Noir.  As the Ostler Wine website says, twenty years ago he and Ann’s brother, winemaker and viticulturist Jeff Sinnott, went looking for a place in the Waitaki Valley near Oamaru where they could grow wine grapes.

Though the region had not featured vineyards to that point, the men “discovered a site Sinnott believed encapsulated the essential parameters for growing premium cool climate wine grapes; a north-facing limestone-influenced slope on an escarpment overlooking the braided river. It reminded him of the famous slopes of Burgundy.”

Indeed, the Waitaki Valley limestone seam not only imparts its characteristic minerality to the terroir, it also yields fossils that hint at the fact that this region was once a warm, shallow sea. That fossil shell embedded in limestone forms the logo for the Ostler family of wines.

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We enjoyed our tasting as Jim poured, telling us a little about the Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris we were sampling.  (For me, some of our Lake Ontario limestone-clay Pinot Noirs have more of the ‘licked stone’ minerality taste than the Ostler Wines,)

And though it’s not in the photo below, the utterly delicious Gewürztraminer we would buy from Ostler that day would be our afternoon reward for hiking the Hooker Valley Track at Aoraki Mount Cook the next day.

Outside, some of our group enjoyed sitting in the Jerrams’ kitchen garden…..

…. while others on the patio on the west side of the house inspected the native plants that had now become familiar to us, the various tussock grasses and tortured shrubs (I think the one below is Corokia cotoneaster).

There was rock daisy (Pachystegia insignis)…..

….. and the strange-looking toothed lancewood or horoeka (Pseudopanax ferox) that protects its gawky, Dr. Seuss-like juvenile form with fierce spines until it attains sufficient height and girth to assume a more traditional tree-like habit.

We made our purchases, with some in the group ordering wine to be delivered back in the U.S.  As always, Panayoti Kelaidis of Denver Botanic Garden offered gracious thanks to Jim Jerram on behalf of all of us and the American Horticultural Society, words he managed to tailor eloquently to each host on our New Zealand tour. And then it was time to drive on to mighty Aoraki Mount Cook.