Seven pages of plain quarto sized paper, written on rectos only. Approx. 1000 words, with occasional corrections. Cover page inscribed by Bates, "For Frank and Joan: - just a little return for a wonderful day. Let me have the typescript back one day at your convenience (sorry! I meant when you have time!) with love HE. June 23 / 70".With a photocopy of the typescript. Also with a letter from Frank Rodwell, thanking Bates for this manuscript and for the typescript of "The Triple Echo", saying "I cannot adequately tell you how thrilled Joan & I are to have it", and commenting that he ought to have both manuscripts bound together, which evidently did not come to pass. Ro also notes that he now intends to plant a Handkerchief tree of his own in his garden. Rodwell also asks "Do you not feel, as I do, that The Triple Echo would make a wonderful film" (it was filmed in 1972 staring Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed).

The original manuscript of a lively essay by Bates in honour of the "incomparable creature" of The Handkerchief Tree, or Davidia involucrata. The essay was published in In Living (December 1970), and in it Bates relates a visit to the gardens at Nymans with his friend Frank Rodwell, to whom he gave this manuscript as a memento of the day.
The essay describes their first sight of two handkerchief trees at Nymans, a specimen Bates had read about "at least thirty years ago, but I had never once seen it in flower and it was these two glorious specimens of it, more like trees filled with pure white birds than handkerchiefs, that brought my friend and I to our moment of desperate despair." Bates's essay goes on to tell the story of the tree's rediscovery and cultivation in 1899 by Ernest Henry Wilson.

Stock ID: 28973