Pterostyrax corymbosus

The little epaulette tree is a rare small deciduous tree or large shrub from eastern Asia, and the common name is the best description anyone has managed. In late spring and early summer the branch tips hang with drooping panicles of small fragrant white flowers, and the effect really is of fringed military shoulder boards swinging from the ends of the branches. The leaves are ovate and bristle-toothed, the habit open and spreading, and the whole tree has an unforced elegance that the heavier flowering trees never quite reach.

A word on the name, because two versions are in circulation. The correct form of the epithet is corymbosus, agreeing with the masculine genus, and older catalogs including our own have long carried the plant as Pterostyrax corymbosa. The genus name is built from the Greek pteron, a wing, and styrax, for the closely related storax; the wing refers to the fruit. Pterostyrax sits in Styracaceae, the storax family, in the company of the snowbells and of our own native silverbells, Halesia, and this species was in fact once described as Halesia corymbosa.

The flowers give way to the feature that names the genus: small dry fruits carried on five distinct wings, ribbed and curious, persisting on the tree after the leaves have gone and worth looking at closely. Bees work the panicles thoroughly while they last, and the fragrance carries on a still evening. There is no ethnobotanical tradition to report here, no medicine or timber use of any consequence; the little epaulette tree is grown in gardens because somebody noticed how the flowers hang, and for once that is reason enough.

Plant the little epaulette tree as a specimen for a lawn or an open border in fertile, well-drained soil, in full sun to light shade, and give room for the spreading head to develop, reckoning on fifteen to twenty feet in most gardens and rather more with age and patience. Site the tree where the drooping flowers can be seen from below or from a slope, since a panicle hanging at eye level is worth far more than the same panicle overhead. Shelter from hard wind, which tears the soft foliage. Hardy through USDA zones 6 to 8. This is a genuinely uncommon tree in American gardens, and growing one is a small argument for widening the palette beyond the usual dozen.