This tree was discovered in around 1880 by a French Catholic Missionary of the
Paris Foreign Missions (MEP), near the ruins of a house above the shore-line of western
Hong Kong island near
Pok Fu Lam and propagated to the formal botanical gardens in Victoria/Central. Dunn named the tree for "Sir Henry and Lady Blake", the former being
Sir Henry Blake,
British Governor of Hong Kong, from 1898 to 1903. Sir Henry and Lady Blake were thus thanked for their promotion of the Hong Kong Botanic Gardens. Dunn's description was based on the trees in the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens, which had been grown from cuttings taken from trees cultivated in the French Mission at
Pokfulam, on the west coast of Hong Kong Island, which in turn were derived from a tree (or trees) found nearby. As far as is known, all the French Mission cuttings were taken from a single tree, so all Hong Kong orchid trees today would be
clones of the original tree. Dr Lawrence Ramsden of the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Botany estimates that this clonal origin would mean that
B. ×
blakeana could be susceptible to decimation by epidemics, though it has so far avoided major diseases. In order to avoid the susceptibility of
B. ×
blakeana to diseases due to the lack of genetic diversity from the current clones of a single
B. ×
blakeana tree back in 1880s, efforts should be made to re-hybridise the parental species of
B. ×
blakeana, ie, crossing
B. purpurea and
B. variegata to generate new hybrid specimens of
B. ×
blakeana instead to add new genetic materials to the current stock of
B. ×
blakeana. To solve the mystery of Hong Kong Bauhinia's parentage a community crowdfunded Bauhinia Genome project was launched in 2015, finally completing the genome and determing the maternal and parenal species in 2025. ==Usage as an emblem==