There Is Only One Bauhinia × blakeana in the World

Hong Kong’s iconic Bauhinia × blakeana, which has adorned the territory’s flag since the handover, is a unique plant in the most literal sense. Indeed, all specimens of Bauhinia × blakeana, without exception, share identical genetic material. In essence, they are clones of a single plant that died over a century ago.

In 1880, a French Catholic missionary discovered an unknown plant in Pok Fu Lam, on the southwestern shores of Hong Kong Island. The French Mission subsequently took cuttings of the original tree and cultivated them.

In 1908, the plant was formally described by botanist S.T. Dunn, who named it Bauhinia blakeana (without the "×" denoting a hybrid) after Sir Henry Blake, the then-governor of Hong Kong. Although the Hong Kong Botanical Garden had suspected the plant to be sterile, and possibly a hybrid, since the late 1890s, S.T. Dunn documented it initially as a new species.

In 1914, the Hong Kong Botanical Garden transferred clones of Bauhinia × blakeana to Sydney, Australia, as well as to Florida and California in the United States. Since then, the plant has been further cloned and spread across the world.

Eventually, in 2005, the University of Hong Kong scientifically confirmed Bauhinia × blakeana was a hybrid, and in 2025, its genome was fully sequenced, further confirming that the Hong Kong orchid tree was a hybrid stemming from the cross-pollination between Bauhinia purpurea and Bauhinia variegata.