Matilda Smith del. · John Nugent Fitch lith. · Vincent Brooks, Day & Son Ltd · L. Reeve & Co., London
Week of 25 May 2026
Tangut daphne
Part 5 of 6 in Flowering shrubs
Daphne tangutica
A compact evergreen daphne from the mountains of western China whose purple-and-white flowers scent the air in late winter and again in autumn.
- Published
- Plate 8855, volume 146, 1920
- From
- Curtis's Botanical Magazine
- Drawn by
- Matilda Smith
- Lithograph
- John Nugent Fitch
- Technique
- Hand-coloured lithograph
- Family
- Thymelaeaceae
- Native to
- Western China
About the plant
Daphnes are the shrubs gardeners plant by the door, for the scent they give in the months when little else is out, and Daphne tangutica is among the most dependable of them. It makes a rounded evergreen bush a metre high and wide, and from late winter into spring every shoot ends in a cluster of flowers purple-pink outside and white within, breathing a sweetness that stops people on the path. It often flowers again in autumn, and in between bears red berries, which should be left to the birds: every part of a daphne is poisonous.
It comes from the high country of western China, from the Tangut lands of Gansu, where the Russian explorer Nikolai Przewalski collected it in the 1870s, south through Sichuan to Yunnan. Carl Maximowicz described it in St Petersburg in 1879, and seed from the plant hunters of the 1910s brought it into cultivation; it has held the RHS Award of Garden Merit for decades.
Matilda Smith drew it in 1920, in her last year or two at Kew, and the plate shows the neat whorls of leathery leaves that make it as good a shrub in August as in March.
Bought together
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