Davidia involucrata

As I showed a random page of a very large book I've recently received on Interlibrary Loan, The Architecture of Trees, to my Chinese tutor in Oslo (!), she said: "左边的是不是handkerchief tree!" Indeed it is! Not for nothing did she recently complete a virtual course in botanical illustration from a Botanical Garden in Scotland. The tree, rarely seen in European gardens, originated in China. The rather gorgeous book, with 1:100 pen drawings by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi of over 500 trees, was originally published in 1982 but newly reedited for the English translation. A few more spreads (with my pencil for scale): 

And two glimpses of the larger apparatus - a representation of the shadows cast by a tree in Rome at different times of the year, and one of the relative sizes and colors of trees across the four seasons. 

This seems to be a book for landscape architects, offering yet another way to think about trees in time and space and combination... 

Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, The Architecture of Trees, trans. Natalie Danford (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019)