Magnolias.....

This was from Thursday evening. I was driving to a friend's house on Seymour Grove in Old Trafford. There was a vicious, sudden downpour from this lead grey sky over Manchester while there was brilliant sunshine over Trafford. It produced the most wonderful rainbow which I wanted to photograph.

But in the minute it took to get to my friends house, the downpour finished and the rainbow had faded. I contented myself with a picture of this magnificent pink magnolia tree in next door's garden against the iron grey sky.

My friend's little six year old daughter wanted to know why I was taking a picture of the tree. We ended up looking magnolias up on my iPad. We were both interested to discover that they are very ancient trees, approximately 100,000,000 years old. That puts them in the late Cretaceous period. There flowers have evolved to be pollinated by beetles rather than bees as bees hadn't evolved then. We looked up what creatures were about then and discovered that there were some pretty impressive dinosaurs living at that time. She was impressed and enchanted with the idea that dinosaurs might have, safely in the past, strolled along Seymour Grove into Chorlton, stopping to nibble some magnolia flowers...