*

Change from a magnolia’s point of view…

Changing from this…

Whenever I pass a magnolia tree in the winter I can’t resist stroking the fuzzy bud with my finger.

to this…

the poem says ‘flowers bloom, flowers fall’, about how things change through life…

but before they fall they prepare – inside the white magnolia is the beginning of another magnolia tree

to this…

Sometimes they form seed pods. Last year the weather was weird with winter lasting until the middle of July. From gardening I know that some plants only respond to death threats. They think, ‘I’m going to die, BUT I will persist!’ and then form a mass of flowers followed by a mass of seeds. There were a LOT of seed pods last year.  I took this one home and planted it. If it grows up and takes after its parent tree, it will take up my entire back yard and most of my neighbour’s as well.

Flowers aren’t the only thing about plants that change, sometimes the leaves change too, from these delicate leaves in spring green…

to these skeletal remains…

leaves decaying into the soil, forming nutrition for the following year

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/weekly-photo-challenge-change/

* a little more about the Chinese characters.

The character for ‘change‘ is a pictogram of a man standing and then changing into a sitting position. In Pinyin it is pronounced ‘hua‘. The character for ‘plant‘ is actually better known as ‘grass‘, ‘cao‘, but to me the pictogram of two sprouts look more like two small plants than any grass I’m familiar with. This character, in its abbreviated form of two small crosses is used as a radical, and appears on the top of compound Chinese characters. It indicates that the character has something to do with plants. The character for ‘flower‘ has the ‘grass‘ (which I call ‘plant’) radical on top, with the phonetic ‘change‘ character below indicating that it is something about plants that is pronounced something like ‘change‘, in this case ‘hua‘.