Read by Matilda Longbottom

I’m not the first person who fell in love with a tree. Xerxes (according to John Evelyn) halted his army of 170,000 soldiers because he had been smitten by a plane, or sycamore, tree. He even covered it with “gold, gems, necklaces, scarfs and brace­ lets, and infinite riches,” which he took from his concubines and other “great persons.” I fell in love with a Davidia Involu­ crata, and wanted one near me always.

It is called also a Dove Tree, a Handkerchief Tree, and most properly I think, a Ghost Tree. I had never seen one, or heard of it, until unwittingly I came across one in full bloom. That is the best way to discover it and, like all great experiences, is better in the living than the recounting. But I shall try.

On a visit back to England, I was walking with my father in Wakehurst Place, a branch of Kew Gardens. As usual, we were talking nonstop, because we rarely see each other. We were right underneath it before either of us noticed it. When we did, we stopped, completely silenced, for what seemed a long time.

“What is it?” he whispered. I did not know. We gazed up into its branches.

The Ghost Tree has a flower unlike any other tree. Botanists will tell you sternly that it is not the flower, but the bract, that mystifies all who have ever seen it. It is a simple large white petal (no, bract) about the size and shape of the palm of a hand (an angel’s hand, or a ghost’s hand), a roosting white dove, or the handkerchief with which Marie Antoinette wiped away her tears. Hundreds of these white fragments hang down from the tree, fluttering gently, like so many messages pinned to its branches, messages about things we simply do not understand.

My father and I stood under this tree for a very long time.

It was a rare sunny day in England, and behind the pale, tremu­lous fluttering was the brilliant sky.

It was a revelation utterly unexpected in the midst of jokes and chatter.

Finally, I bestirred myself to look at the label: “Davidia Involucrata, native of China.” I had not yet learned that one can love without possessing.

After all, it was more than 15 years ago and I was younger then. I looked on the ground and, yes, there were plenty of seeds. I stuffed my pockets and handbag. When I went home in the aeroplane, I packed them in my shoes and did not confide in the Customs Officer. He would not have understood.

Alas, I could not get them to germinate. I tried freezing them, I tried soaking them, I tried nicking them. They are like impenetrable black walnuts.

The people in Kew had a hard time starting them, too, when they were first imported-for the story of the Ghost Tree is one of elusiveness and wonder. Pierre David, the Jesuit missionary and explorer, first described it, but did not manage to bring it home. Our own Edmund Wilson, discoverer of the Regal Lily and curator of the Arnold Arboretum, first succeeded in doing so: but not at once, and not easily. He was sent out by Veitch’s nursery specifically to find the legendary tree.

Augustine Henry, who had found one earlier but not collected seeds, supplied Wilson with a rough map of where it was, in an area about the size of New York State. Wilson, after waiting two months until the tree would be in flower, laboriously tracked it down. When he reached the spot, he saw it had just been felled to build a Chinese home and only the stump remained. No others were known. Finally, though, he came across a grove of them and collected seed. The seeds, after much trial and error, did germinate, and Kew Gardens has had the trees ever since.

I knew that Pennsylvania had the right climate for many Chinese plants, and I was certain that, if I could obtain one, a Davidia would grow in my garden. I announced to my family that I wanted nothing else for Christmas, my birthday, or any other occasion. I wanted, please, a Davidia Involucrata.

This is the kind of irritating thing that gardeners do to their families. How much easier to be married to someone who would enjoy a negligee or the latest best-selling novel. It took months to locate a Davidia, and then the cost of shipping it alone would have bought the filmiest lingerie imaginable. When it did come, months after the Christmas and birthday celebrations were over, it was an ordinary little thing, with leaves like a mulberry, in a not very large plastic pot.

“I suppose it’s really what you wanted?” they said, as I unwrapped it.

Yes, it was. I used to go and stand above all 18 inches of it and see again those moments under the interlaced, beckoning branches at Wakehurst. Then, as doting lovers will, I all but killed it with the excess of my affection.

Its first winter, fearful that it would die of cold, I smothered it too early in a cozy bed of straw.

Next spring, when I gingerly removed the covering, I found that a mouse had moved into the straw.

Mice will do that if you put gown a winter mulch too early, and this one had eaten a neat section all around the tender bark of my treasure.

The 18 inches above the gnawed ring were completely dead.

How I cried.

Even my loving family grew a little impatient when I went out tearfully every morning, armed with a magni­fying, glass, to see if, hope against hope, there might not be a sign of life somewhere.

Then one day, holding the magnifying glass just right, I saw a tiny green swelling under the gnawed ring.

I called everyone to look, but no one else could see it, and they asked me to stop fussing.

They would get me another tree “sometime.”

But that speck of green really was a bud. Love can find hope and potential where no one else can see it, even magnified.

The swelling turned slowly into a shoot, no longer than a matchstick.

I had not killed it after all.

That was 15 years ago and it takes at least 15 years for a Davidia to flower, if it flowers at all. Since then I have watched other buds with hope and disappointment, and now if we ever move I know I will have to leave my tree behind. For I look up now into its branches: it is taller than even my tallest son. But in 15 years I have maybe learned a little, too. I do not have to have everything I love.

It may be that I will not, after all, look up into the flowering branches of my own Davidia, and that someone else, looking at the ghostly silhouette, will be the first to see again, to feel again, what I did 15 years ago. That, after all, is what ghosts do best, bring back moments of experience so vivid they can never dis­ appear. And that is why we plant trees, not for ourselves, but for those who come after us. Even so, I may think myself so philosophical and wise, I am still a little in love-with a tree.

Xerxes had to leave his tree, too: “He stiled it his Mistress, his Minion, his Goddess; and when he was forced to part from it, he caused the Figure of it to be stamped in a Medal of Gold, which he continually wore about him.”

I will have to take memories, not gold medals, with me, if I have to leave my tree, but I am still hoping that before that happens, those fluttering doves, those handkerchiefs, those ghostly hands may beckon to me. ❖