This month I am reflecting on a tree I wish I had got in the ground years ago, so that I could be enjoying it now.
Sadly, since it takes ten years or more to flower, I am afraid I am going to have to visit someone else’s garden to lie (in April or May, depending on our season) under the fluttering white handkerchiefs of Davidia involucrata.
19th Century French priest sent on expedition
This desirable tree has a nice link to France, since it was first discovered by Père Armand David in 1869 on a natural history expedition from Beijing (previously Peking), west to the flower-rich territory of Sichuan and Tibet.
With a degree in biology from the university in his native Espelette in the north of the Basque country, he was ordained a Lazurist (missionary) priest in 1850 and dispatched to Beijing 1862 as part of a team setting up proselytising schools.
In 1869, the Natural History Museum of Paris persuaded the Lazarist mission that Père David should be dispatched on a government-funded expedition west of Beijing into the flower-rich regions of Sichuan and down into Tibet.
First western sighting of Giant panda
This landmark trip is best remembered amongst the scientific community as marking the first western sighting of the ‘fameux ours blanc et noir’, or Giant panda.
In the month of March his first encounter with the bear was, sadly, in the form of a rug on the floor of the home of his dinner host for the evening – ‘un certain Li’, who was the biggest landowner in the Hong-chan-tin valley in Sichuan, which Père David was then surveying.
He did manage, thankfully, to finally encounter a live specimen, later in the month of April.
Advertisment
Witnessed Davidia involucrata in flower
Much less famously, it was exactly in this month and in this valley that he saw Davidia involucrata in flower, sending specimen leaves and flower bracts back to the museum in Paris.
The flowering davidia involucrata treeMartin Hibberd/Shutterstock
Europe would have to wait until 1897 before another French botanist-cleric, Frère Paul Farges, dispatched in the tracks of Père David by his patron Maurice de Vilmorin, brought seed back to France.
Two years later Vilmorin had germinated one seedling and was savvy enough to ensure distribution of this fabulous new genus by sending out cutting-raised material to European botanic establishments, well before the original tree flowered for the first time ‘in captivity’ in 1906.
Most of today’s commercially available Davidia stock has, as its origin, the hugely successful later crop of 13,000 seedlings raised by English nurseryman, Harry Veitch, in about 1900.
Patience needed to see it flower
There is no reason why I should not plant Davidia here – it is a medium-sized tree, no larger than about 20m in maturity and I would have the space.
It likes well-drained but moisture-retentive soils which are, like its native mountain forests in China, fairly rich in organic matter.
The issue is that I might have to wait between 10 and 20 years to see those wonderful bracts, with the glorious, ball-like agglomeration of stamens at their base.
Instead, I think it would be best to go to the national arboretum of Barres in the Loiret.
The Domaine de Barres was the family home of Maurice de Vilmorin and you can still see the first Davidia involucrata introduced to the West in its grounds.
