Magnolia (September)

It is, we cannot but see it, a symbol of survival. On what other tree does the flower burst forth before the leaf, as though it must force out statements before the necessary preliminaries? How ancient is ‘before the bees’? It survived thanks to beetles going merry-go-round between the petals and the cone year in, year out, across Asia, as the world rotated, so long ago. Whatever long ago is, exactly. Mauve and white and pink are the colours of survival? Mighty trees they were, still are in places. Though why someone, still a little bleary from last night’s conviviality and not exactly sure if evolution or existence itself is the main question, stares simplemindedly at a tree a surviving descendant of thousands of years of rough extreme, only to wonder why trees are planted for purely decorative purposes, he cannot say. The pink blush of petals defies the pattern of a native garden. They are fleshy and rounded, they turn into a cloud of flowers for days before the leaves cast their green shadows. Mighty things out of rocky places and most every climate. Decoration oughtn’t to be anything to agonise about. Some people do. They believe in superior decoration and won’t accept anything less. Or else they see decoration as a perjorative, an abstraction behind or beside or around the thing that matters. He doesn’t agonise, only he knows from what he’s been told that nothing in nature is purely decorative. It goes on doing survival against all the odds. It survives even as he survives, consciousness evening out last night’s crazy opposites and this morning’s soft honesty that, against all odds, it’s another day. Only does it think for itself? What is it saying to him? By Christmas all the mulch will be feeding its thoughtful root system. It will be perfect and all green, sober as a judge, while carols sail from the windows and red wine flows to sort out differences. Will there be a time ‘after the bees’?