Nature Studies by Michael McCarthy: The quintessence of early spring

Small marvels are a comfort sometimes. In a week of dire disasters and wars across the world, there are no headlines announcing that the magnolias have just flowered. But so they have.

In my part of suburban west London, the great upright buds, fat as light bulbs, are bursting open everywhere and turning into enormous, blowsy blooms on the leafless branches of their trees. They seem far too exotic to be English and indeed they are not; their natural home is split between two far more glamorous parts of the world, in botanical terms, Asia and Central America (including the southern USA), but the intrepid efforts of plant collectors over the last two centuries have brought many of the 200-odd species back to Britain, where they have flourished.

In my corner of the world they prosper in sunny front gardens, and on my commuter's morning trudge from door to station I pass several of them, just as I pass several blossoming cherries; but while the cherries are of course a pleasure, I do not watch for their flowering with anything like the same heightened anticipation. Their buds are so diminutive as to escape notice, but the bulging buds of the magnolias – erect, fleshy, tumescent – are quite unmissable, and watching them grow fatter and fatter is like watching fizzing fireworks ready to explode, until eventually Bang! they do, and suddenly there before somebody's front window is a smooth bare tree covered in waterlilies.

Or so it seems to me. It's quite a challenge to find words to describe the extraordinary spectacle a big flowering magnolia presents. I asked a colleague, Victoria Summerley, who is a keen gardener, and without missing a beat she said: "Huge white blossom that look like doves nesting in the tree." It's not always white, but whether it's cream, or pink, or white-and-pink, or yellow, I have often been brought up short by the sight – stopped the car, got off the bike, paused in the walk – and looked open-mouthed on a picture of tropical, fleshy exuberance flaunting itself shamelessly while all the surrounding trees are timidly wondering whether to put out a leaf or two.

This luxuriant flowering at what is usually a chilly, inhospitable time, the very beginning of spring, is one of the reasons why magnolias are so eye-catching in Britain. Another is that in the urban context, where I tend to see them, their bright boldness shows them off particularly well against brick or stucco. But perhaps the reason why they are special anywhere is the nature of the blossoms, which are not only whacking great things, but seem uncomplicated: like the tree itself they have a clear, simple structure of clean lines. In style terms, they're minimalist.

This is no doubt because magnolias are among the most ancient and primitive of all flowering plants (like the waterlilies their blossoms superficially resemble); they give us a hint of what flowering plants might have looked like when they first developed from conifers between 150 and 200 million years ago. If you look at a magnolia bud, it looks very like a closed pine cone; you might say a magnolia flower is what an open pine cone became, once it had evolved colour and nectar to attract the winged insects to pollinate it, which were evolving at the same time.

But although in somewhere like west London they are common enough in gardens now, it remains the case that magnolias are not natives to Britain and in much of the country you will struggle to find them. If you're keen to do so, the answer is to make a trip to one of Britain's four national magnolia collections, located in the gardens of Wentworth Castle in Yorkshire, Windsor Great Park in Berkshire, Bodnant in North Wales and Caerhays Castle in Cornwall. And now is the time.

I made a magnolia trip myself this week, but that was only around the corner to Kew. The Royal Botanic Gardens has about 400 magnolias scattered throughout its 14,000-strong tree collection, including a grove of about a score or so of different varieties. (It's not signposted, but it's on the edge of the azalea garden, which is. If you can find a majestic, very tall cedar of Lebanon tree, you're on top of it).

The cold winter has delayed the flowering of some of these, such as the magnificent and very early Campbell's magnolia, which is dark pink and was discovered and brought back from Sikkim in the Himalayas in the mid-19th century by Joseph Hooker, the great botanist and Kew Director who was Charles Darwin's closest friend. (Tony Kirkham, head of Kew's arboretum, said to me as we gazed on it: "Imagine him coming across it in the forest for the first time.")

So by happenstance all the different magnolias in this grove are flowering together, and with the daffodils flowering underneath them in the sunshine, and all of Kew resounding with the echoing drumming of great-spotted woodpeckers, they seemed to provide the quintessence of early spring, of an Earth suddenly bounding out of its winter coma. And it seemed to me, standing before them, that amongst all the other headlines of disaster and catastrophe and war and suffering, these pieces of springtime from India, China and Japan offered a certain amount of evidence that the world has a hopeful side to it as well, and they were worth a headline too.

Like Michael McCarthy on The Independent on Facebook for updates

m.mccarthy@independent.co.uk