Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its stamens are not slender stalks with {anthers} perched on top but flat, strap-like blades with the pollen sacs sunk into their faces. Sepal and petal cannot be told apart: the whole cup is built of thick creamy {tepals} set in threes, and the sexual parts spiral up a green central column instead of ringing a flat disc. Every shoot tip is sheathed in a single large {stipule} that is thrown off as the leaf expands, leaving a fine ring scar right around the twig at each {node}. Beetles do the pollinating, not bees, and the {carpels} are built thick and leathery enough to survive being chewed by their clumsy visitors. When the flower is spent that central column hardens into a knobbly cone, and by autumn scarlet-coated seeds are swinging clear of it on fine elastic threads. Its blades are simple and entire, tapering or rounded to a tip, never cut into lobes and never squared off or notched across the end. Flowers come singly and terminally, one to the tip of a shoot, rather than scattered along it in the leaf joints. It keeps its thick leathery leaves, 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 cm) long, right through the winter, shedding the old ones piecemeal all year instead of all at once. The underside of every leaf is coated in a dense rusty-brown felt, so the crown flashes two colours whenever wind lifts the foliage. Its creamy white cups open 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 cm) across from May to July, after the foliage is fully out, and carry a heavy sweet lemon scent. The species epithet is a Latin compound meaning large-flowered, and it is not an exaggeration. Native to bottomland forests from Virginia to central Florida and west to east Texas, it is the state flower of both Mississippi and Louisiana and the signature evergreen of historic gardens in Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans.

Accepted Answer

Magnolia grandiflora

Name That Plant #079