This tree deserves admiring its longevity and antiquity. It has earned applause as a living fossil. Lone surviving species, probably domesticated many centuries ago, within a family — that may have counted up to 70 species. A family that is, arguably, one of the trees on this planet. The ginkgo appeared 270 million years ago, 40 million years before the dinosaurs.
To illustrate the longevity of individual ginkgos, numbered in centuries, many regurgitate the survival story of specimens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About 170 ginkgo trees survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. But, lest one be too loud in speaking of their resilience, 38 other species did as well — not to mention human survivors, such as our former neighbor in Princeton, the Nobel prizewinner Shimomura Osamu (for chemistry in 2008). As a child, he was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped.
Preservation of the ginkgo in China may have been due to Buddhist monks planting it in front of their monasteries, a millenium ago. The name of the genus is a faulty transliteration of its names in Mandarin and in Japanese. The species name refers to the characteristic bilobal leaves. The tree we are proud to have in our garden is a male — few people purchase the female tree, because the ovules stink at certain times.
The New Yorker magazine, in its issue of November 17 2014, published a short piece by Oliver Sacks. He wrote it just a few days earlier, on November 13. It is entitled « ‟The Night of the Ginkgo.‟ The famous author turned his admiration for the tree into a fable, one of those often mocked urban legends: ‟While the leaves of the more modern angiosperms—maples, oaks, beeches, what have you—are shed over a period of weeks after turning dry and brown, the ginkgo, a gymnosperm, drops its leaves all at once.‟ He quotes the book Ginkgo (2013) by the Yale botanist Peter Crane, in support of such synchronicity.
Since the ginkgo in our yard takes longer to shed its gilded leaves, a week or 10 days, I offer another interpretation. When Oliver Sacks wrote this piece, he was already terminally ill. He would die on August 30, 2015. In penning this lovely little piece, a prose poem truly, was he not anticipating his own passing?