The Handkerchief Tree by Caledonian Hall

The white handkerchiefs are not flowers. Davidia involucrata produces a small, dark, unremarkable flower head and wraps it in two large white bracts, modified leaves that hang and turn in any breeze. In May a mature tree carries hundreds of them at once, which is how it collected the names handkerchief tree, dove tree and ghost tree. This one stands in the Caledonian Hall area of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, filed in the garden's living collection database under accession number 19280013. RBGE accession numbers open with the year the plant came in, so that reads as 1928 and puts the tree at roughly 95 to 98 years old. Treat it as a strong estimate rather than a certificate: an accession year records when the garden took a plant onto its books, not the day it went into the ground, and the two can sit a season or several years apart. The species is native to south west China and was among the most fought-over introductions of the early 20th century, when European nurseries were sending collectors across China specifically to bring it home. RBGE holds several Davidia accessions around the garden; this is the Caledonian Hall one, the oldest-accessioned of them and the nearest to the rest of this walk. Its pin comes from the building's position on the visitor map rather than a measured point.