The Southern Magnolia aka Magnolia grandiflora and I’ve located one so far. Oh, but you don’t know what I mean even though you guessed from the title that this is journal #377.
March, being the month of magnolias, will be marked this year by my challenging myself to make a chapbook of magnolia photos. Magnolia will be the next photozine from Bracket Books Ireland.
The challenge rules are simple. All magnolias that I use must be within a very suburban 5 km of our home, since I’m not allowed range further. But we live on an eroded coast and that reduces the onshore area from 78 to just 38 kilometres2.
I already knew a few showy trees and shrubs in the area and I’ve even searched for more using satellite imagery. I manipulated the colours to detect magnolia by their chrominance, luminance and reflectance. I then visited the remotely surveilled candidates and found about 12 of 15 were correct (not bad).
So now I have found about 30 magnolias in my pandemic limited area. But the variants have different reflection properties and thus the satellite images haven’t really helped. I asked some people who work in the field about multispectral imagery from NASA, ESA and other vendors after I read that a lot of folk are actively trying to identify trees from space for forestry management and carbon offset calculations.
I’ve been talking to some of the specimen-tree owners and found them very receptive to my approaches. They’ve been happy to tell me about rival trees. Thus have I found a few showy magnolias I would not otherwise have known. I’ve been to a couple of garden centres to learn what to look for but I admit that I can’t reliably name most variants before they bloom.
And so the quest continues. The evergreen grandiflora won’t bloom during my challenge so I’m focussing on deciduous variants. I know where there is a magnificent yulan but it’s just beyond my range. So it’d be nice to have the compensation of finding a yellow daphne or a beaming white kobus also known as the mokryeon. And as more and more magnolia ‘candles’ light up, I will add many more potentials to my candidate lists. Fingers are firmly crossed.
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