Handkerchief Tree

Davidia involucrata makes a small dark flower head of no interest whatever and wraps it in two oversized white bracts, modified leaves that hang below it and turn in any breeze. For roughly ten days to a fortnight in May a mature tree carries hundreds of them at once, which is where handkerchief tree, dove tree and ghost tree all come from, and outside those two weeks it is an ordinary looking thing. Western botany did not know the species existed until the French missionary Armand David documented it in the mountains of central China in 1869, and it stayed rare in cultivation because the seed can sit for two winters before it does anything. Three are mapped, in Copenhagen, Edinburgh and Utrecht, and only Edinburgh's has a date: an accession number that opens 1928.