The Handkerchief Tree of Assistens

What looks like flowers on this tree are leaves. For roughly two weeks in May the handkerchief tree hangs hundreds of paired white bracts through its crown, each pair a modified leaf wrapped around a small dark ball of actual flower, and Danish names it better than English does: duetræ, the dove tree. Davidia involucrata grows wild in the mountains of western China and reached Western cultivation only in 1904, through the plant hunter Ernest Wilson. It is still an uncommon thing to find in Denmark, and this one is multi-stemmed, so in May the bracts come at you from several directions at once. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. The Danish Dendrological Society surveyed Assistens in November 2019, put a GPS point on this tree, measured 1.4 metres around its stems and recorded it alive and healthy. That is the honest limit of what is known here: a girth, not an age. The range on this page is inferred from that measurement and from how recently the species arrived in Danish gardens, not read off any record. It stands in section A of a cemetery Copenhagen treats as a park. People run, read and eat their lunch here, a few hundred metres from the graves of Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard.