Leominster twinners scoured the country looking for a special tree to present to their twin town in the Alsace region of France.

But they contacted the biggest and the best among the UK's garden and plant centres without success in their search for a Davidia involucrata, a tree particularly sought in Saverne, a town 36kms from Strasbourg.

In the end, and with hope almost given up, they found the tree - more commonly referred to as the Handkerchief tree - just three miles away, at the Ornamental Tree Nurseries at Cobnash near Leominster!

"We were both surprised but delighted," Heather Phillips, vice-chairman of the Leominster-Saverne Twinning Association, said this week. "We had put calls out to most of the biggest nurseries and drawn a blank. We had almost given up finding the tree.

"Then we found one on our own doorstep."

At Cobnash, Mrs Sue Mills, who runs the nursery with her husband, Russell, said the Davidia was just one of 300 varieties of trees grown on their 20 acres.

"Perhaps the difference between us and other, bigger nurseries, is that we are tree specialists," she said. "With some of the varieties we grow, there may only be one or two other suppliers in the whole country. Trees are very much our forte."

The Handkerchief tree will form the centrepiece of a special amenity planting scheme the association is undertaking in Saverne. It is a gesture by the Leominster twinners to replace some trees in the town following the tremendous storms which destroyed many of France's forests and trees in late 1999.

The association was helped in its task by a grant of £500 by the Herefordshire Twinning Forum and which has been used to part fund the venture. Apart from the Davidia, the remainder of the trees will be sourced locally in France.

The Davidia involucrata while not a British species, is nonetheless a tree that invokes the memory of one of the country's great plant hunters, Ernest Henry Wilson.

Legendary

Before his 40th birthday he was the legendary 'Chinese' Wilson, famed for his travels in the East. Quite simply he was to become the most prolific plant hunter of all time and before his tragic death in 1930 he had discovered 3,000 new species - about 1,000 of which were brought back for cultivation in the gardens of Europe and the US.

It was on his first expedition which lasted from 1899 to 1902 that Wilson found Davidia involucrata in the mountainous region of north west China. On the same expedition he also found the Primrose jasmine, Magnolia delavayi, the Chinese Hill cherry and the Paperbark maple, all now plants to be found in the finest of British gardens.