[Granville-Hough] 1 Jul 2009 - Harold Hopkins on Razorbacks and other Wild Things

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

I believe my friend, Harold Hopkins, is the U. S. expert on the 
state tree of Mississippi, the Magnolia Grandiflora. He has closer ties 
than I to our Mississippi home and also keeps up with changes going on 
there.

Personal Letter of Harold Hopkins to a colleague, dated January 24, 
1986, used by permission

Dear …

You probably have no way of knowing this, but I retired
from the government last year, and moved to Montgomery,
Alabama, and found that I didn't have much rapport with that
city and last week moved to Mobile. I actually considered
coming back north to live on the eastern shore (on the water)
but found I couldn't afford that on my retirement pittance.

I read your column, and therefore your recent one about
my banana tree and other jungle flora. I wonder if you ever
saw the photo the staff photographer made of me. He shot it
so that it looked like a plant, in a container behind me, was
growing from the top of my head.

I'm glad the magazine got something together on panarama
art; there was more to it than I realized, and it was high
time somebody gave it such deserved treatment.

I'm writing now because I once proposed an article on
several magnolias growing in one site in Mississippi and
Alabama. I now report that I have visited a place in Alabama
where all six of the U.S. magnolia species, and many other
attractive native ornamentals, occur in a relatively small
site of a few acres (all that remains after extensive clear-
cutting of hardwoods and replanting in pine seedlings by one
of the several paper companies that own vast tracts of land
in southern Alabama). There appear to be a number of such
gardens of Eden in these two states, some threatened by man,
some not, at least now for now. I write at this time because
in your column on the banana and other office eccentricities,
you mentioned a naturalist type photographer, and I wonder if
he (and you, if you would like) could go with me through this
spot 2 or 3 times this spring to catch these magnolias as
they open their flowers. I am not a pro photographer and I
think it will take a pro to get deserving photos, because in
dense woods, magnolia flowers may be high up in the tree.
It's difficult to get more than 2 or 3 magnolias within a
lens at one time, but a professional could probably do an
optimum job, and could get shots that an amateur like me
would not be able to "see" for the trees.

Writing an article on these seems relevant to the
entire evolution of the floral kingdom because magnolias are
thought by many scientists (taxonomists, botanists,
paleontologists, and others) to be perhaps the earliest of
the flowering plants (angiosperms). Flowering plants evolved
from non-flowering plants, and thus are younger in the
evolutionary scale than gymnosperms. The flowers represent
evolution or specialization of the terminal leaves or fronds
into flowers. A number of flowering plants are considered to
be primitive based on several characteristics, such as
spiraled reproductive flowers and fruits, and magnolias are
thought by the experts to have more of these primitive
characters than any other flowering plant. There were once
more magnolia species than now, as shown by fossil evidence
in places where magnolias do not occur today. (magnolias are
confined to eastern Asia and mostly eastern North America and
around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean). That magnolias
survived the ice age and other threats and changes attests to
their durability or adaptability.

Magnolias and certain other primitive (i.e.,
unspecialized) plants are also pollinated by the most
primitive pollinators (beetles, flies). One scientist has
speculated that magnolias have remained primitive because
their symbiosis with beetle pollinators has given them no
need to "advance" into more modern forms. They're happy with
each other and thus evolution is retarded. I am trying to
talk somebody (Auburn University, perhaps) into conducting a
study of the magnolia pollinators at this 6-species site to
identify the insects that pollinate each plant, with a view
to determining among other things why interspecific
hybridization remains minimal, especialy where flowering
periods of adjacent species occur at the same time or
overlap. Obviously other factors are at work too, but study
of six of the world's most primitive plants (plus some
others, in fact) in one area seems important. Magnolia's
haploid chromosome number is 19, and among "natural" magnolia
species there are diploids, tetraploids, and heptaploids.
Some garden and induced hybridization has created many
magnolia "mules" with odd ploidys (triploids, etc.), but are
nevertheless vegetatively propagated as valued ornamentals.

I think it must be the primitive appeal of magnolia
flowers that has attracted me to them. I would like to get
your photographer to shoot these magnolias in habitat and
then I would do an article containing material that we would
discuss and agree upon. I believe it would be a credit to
the magazine and an enlightenment to many people who would
not normally encounter this kind of information.

Here are some other ideas that I think the magazine
could do a good job with. I am not proposing that they be
assigned to me, just that they have the stuff for good
articles: The Natchez Trace (Nashville to Natchez); it went
out of use after steamboats appeared, that is, by 1830 or so.
It began as a series of animal trails, then Indian trails,
then frontiersmen trails. There are a lot of stories about
the Natchez Trace, some blood curdling almost beyond belief.
Meriwether Lewis was mysteriously murdered on the Natchez
Trace. Sunken Roads (the Natchez Trace was one). They began
much the same way the Natchez Trace began. They are sunken
because of the continuing traffic over the ground, with the
action of rain, snow, etc. They have figured in many
battlefields because men can be marched and equipment moved
along such roads so that they cannot be seen. A sunken road
was a major factor in the battle of Waterloo, and I think
there may have been some that figured in Civil War battles.
The Dept. of Interior's Natchez Trace Parkway follows the
original Natchez Trace only generally, and is not sunken, but
some of the sunken sections are still extant and I am sending
you a photograph of such a section that I took several years
ago. Feral hogs in the south (i.e., razorbacks). The hog
was originally a Chinese species, I think. In the south they
were raised for home meat and for market, to which they were
driven (by drovers in droves!). They were turned into the
woods in summer to fatten for fall sale or slaughter. The
owner notched their ears with his mark, and arguments often
arose (viz., Faulkner) about who owned a particular hog, and
bloodshed sometimes followed. Hogs so turned loose into the
woods for fattening on beech mast, etc., were often not found
in the fall and became feral. By random breeding and having
to survive sparse winters they got down to a fighting weight
of 180 to 200 pounds (compared to 800 to l000 pounds for man-
bred animals). A Univ. of Arkansas professor once told me a
story, and some other people say they have heard it too,
that the razorbacks in Arkansas descend from hogs that were
abandoned by DeSoto's men in their panic to put the Indians
behind them before the latter discovered that DeSoto (whom
they thought was a god) had died. He said some of the
Arkansas razorbacks had wattles (a kind of beard) and
horizontal stripes, suggesting a reversioin to type. Some
U.S. razorbacks have been "crossed" with European wild boars
(still the same species) to produce an animal that is hunted
for sport, and there is a place in Tennessee where people pay
to hunt them. There is nothing so ugly and mean looking as a
razorback boar with huge tusks curling away from his mouth.
I once wrote a piece for FDA Consumer about the use of these
razorbacks as research animals, because they are more
tractable than larger hogs (for research purposes, hogs have
many of the same physical characters humans do: they have
heart attacks, skin is similar, they're omnivorous etc.).
Animals that have permanently migrated. In the south there
are armadillos, which somehow crossed the Mississippi about
30 or so years ago and are now all over the south; coyotes,
which I presume are replacing wolves, and often cross with
dogs; cattle egrets, which follow herds of cattle and "groom"
them. Cattle egrets are endemic to India, I think, and are
believed to have entered the U.S. through bad navigation or a
storm while migrating; cougars, which are now found in the
south, but may have been there all along. There are many
others that were presumably not introduced by man, insects
too.