A Tree to Savour

Ginkgo leaf found on Riverside Drive

This past Veterans Day weekend when the temperatures started to drop, so did the ginkgo leaves. Riverside Drive and the upper west 80s and 90s are covered in the golden and green fan-shaped leaves. Cars disappear under the thousands of delicate leaves. Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) or maidenhair trees are known to drop their leaves on the same day or very close to that and so it has been this year.   In his poem “The Consent,” Howard Nemerov reflects on the phenomenon:

“Late in November, on a single night

Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees

In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind

But as though to time alone: the golden and

the green

Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday

Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light

The ginkgo is a fascinating tree.  It is the only living species remaining in its division: Ginkgophyta. It is a living fossil with the earliest leaf fossils dating from 270 million years ago.   As Peter Crane writes in his wonderful book, Ginkgo, “To borrow a phrase from Darwin, ginkgo has become a platypus for the plant kingdom, paleontologists have traced its lineage millions of years into prehistory…a tree that time forgot and an increasingly familiar living link to landscapes of the distant past.”

Crane continues that the ginkgo “inhabited a world without people, and for much of that time, a world very different from that of today.  For tens of millions of years, it lived alongside plants and animals that are long extinct.  Several different kinds of ginkgolike trees watched as our ancestors transformed from reptiles to mammals.” 

The ginkgo is dioecious, which means that some trees are male and some female.  Many prefer the male trees because they do not have fruit.  The female trees produce a seed ball that is smelly and slippery if you step on it.  Although the seeds are prized and used in supplements and various extracts, they are somewhat toxic and should not be eaten raw.  The ginkgo tree is a living fossil whose beauty we still treasure and whose shade we appreciate on hot summer days.  In 1815 Goethe wrote a poem about the ginkgo tree translated by John Whaley from which I have excerpted a few lines.  Go to link below for the whole poem:
https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2013/07/31/poem-of-the-month-gingko-biloba-goethe/ 

From the East this tree’s leaf shows

Secret sense for us to savour

And uplifts the one who knows.

Somewhat mysterious as is the ginkgo tree itself.