The Tree That Time Forgot: The world according to Ginkgo (#453)

There is a Ginkgo tree at the end of my street ....

In summer it is almost forgettable. Just another green shape among poles and power lines.

But in late autumn it does something extraordinary.

Overnight, the leaves turn a clear, unwavering yellow, and then, sometimes in a single windy day, they let go.

The footpath becomes a carpet of fan-shaped coins, as if someone had spilled a jar of sunlight at the cul-de-sac.

Standing there with a rake in my hand, it’s easy to think this is just a tree. But ginkgo is more like a time traveler.

A living fossil at the curb

Botanists call Ginkgo biloba a living fossil because it’s the last surviving member of an ancient lineage, the order Ginkgoales, whose fossil record stretches back more than 200 million years.

Older than the dinosaurs we like to imagine crashing through primeval forests.

At some point in the last few million years, almost all of its relatives disappeared. Climate shifted, continents moved, ice advanced and retreated. Yet this strange tree, with its fan-shaped leaves and stubbornly simple design, endured.

For centuries people thought ginkgos were extinct in the wild, surviving only as cultivated trees in temple courtyards across China and later Japan and Korea. Modern genetic work suggests that a few old-growth populations in southwestern China may be truly wild remnants.

So, when I look at the tree at the end of my street, I’m looking at a survivor from an almost unimaginable past, quietly shading a row of mailboxes.

How the ginkgo got its name

The ginkgo’s name is a story in itself.

In China, the tree has long been known by names that refer to its seeds: silver apricot and white fruit. The pale, apricot-like seeds inside their smelly outer covering are used in traditional cuisine and medicine.

When the tree reached Japan, those same Chinese characters were read differently. One reading was ginkyo.

In the late 1600s, the German physician and naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer encountered the tree in Japanese temple gardens. When he wrote about it in Latin, he attempted to capture the Japanese pronunciation, and probably made a simple transcription error. He wrote Ginkgo.

A few decades later, Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, adopted Kaempfer’s spelling when he formally named the species Ginkgo biloba in 1771.

The second word, biloba, is from Latin—bis (twice) and loba (lobed), a nod to the leaf’s two-lobed shape.

So, the word we use every day for this tree is, quite literally, a typo that went global.

In English, ginkgo is also known as the maidenhair tree, because the leaves resemble those of maidenhair ferns (Adiantum), another small echo of its deep botanical strangeness.

From temple courtyards to city streets

Long before Western botanists arrived with notebooks and quill pens, people in East Asia were planting and protecting ginkgos.

In China, ginkgos were cultivated around temples and monasteries, valued for their nuts and for their connection with longevity, resilience, and quiet strength. Some of these temple trees are believed to be more than a thousand years old.

One of the most famous stands within the walls of Gu Guanyin Buddhist Temple in the Zhongnan Mountains of China. Each autumn, its 1,400-year-old branches turn a brilliant yellow and drop their leaves in a golden avalanche, turning the courtyard into a “sea of gold” that draws visitors from all over the country.

Ginkgos arrived in Japan and Korea centuries ago, where they became closely associated with temples, shrines, and city life. Today the ginkgo leaf is the symbol of Tokyo; the official logo of the University of Tokyo incorporates twin ginkgo leaves. If you’ve ever walked down a ginkgo-lined avenue in Tokyo or Seoul in November, you’ve seen how entire streets can vanish under yellow.

The tree eventually traveled further afield. By the 18th century it was growing in European gardens; by the 19th, it had made it to North America.

City planners loved the tree, because ginkgos tolerate pollution, soil compaction, road salt, and general urban indignity better than most trees.

There is, however, a catch: female trees.

Female ginkgos produce the famous apricot seeds. When they fall and the fleshy outer layer breaks down, they release butyric acid - the same compound that gives rancid butter and vomit their memorable aroma. City crews the world over have learned to plant mostly male trees. Still, every now and then a female slips into the plan, and a street gets its own pungent autumn surprise.

On my street, the ginkgo appears to be male. The leaves drift down, clean and odorless.

Hiroshima and the survivor trees

For all its deep history, perhaps the most powerful modern stories about ginkgo come not from temples or fossils, but from a moment of unimaginable destruction.

On 6 August 1945, the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Within a few kilometers of the blast, almost everything above ground was incinerated. Yet, remarkably, a small number of ginkgo trees survived. At Anraku-ji Temple, about 2 km from the hypocenter, a ginkgo’s branches were burned away, but the trunk lived. New shoots emerged the following year.

These and other surviving trees became known as hibakujumoku, or bombed trees.

Their resilience is partly biological: ginkgos are extremely hardy, with deep roots and a physiology that shrugs off many pests, diseases, and environmental stresses. But there’s also an element of sheer luck and the protective effect of soil and building fragments.

In the decades since, seeds from these survivor ginkgos have been sent around the world as symbols of peace and renewal. Oxford Botanic Garden, Davidson College, San Diego Botanic Garden, Bates College, and many other institutions now nurture saplings grown from Hiroshima seed. Each a quiet, leafy ambassador for the idea that life can persist and even flourish after catastrophe.

The next time you pass a young ginkgo in a park, it’s worth checking the label. You may be walking past a direct descendant of a tree that stood, charred but alive, in the ruins of Hiroshima.

The tree in the lab, the pantry, and the poem

Ginkgo has followed humans into our kitchens, pharmacies, and poems.

In much of East Asia, the nuts, once the soft, smelly outer layer is removed, are used in congee, stir-fries, and celebratory dishes.

In Japan they appear in savory custards like chawanmushi, or simply skewered and grilled with salt in izakaya bars.

In Korea they’re often stir-fried or used as garnishes. They are eaten in moderation, because in excess they can be toxic.

In the West, ginkgo is better known as a herbal supplement, sold in capsules and tinctures promising better memory and sharper thinking.

The science behind most of those claims is mixed at best, and the seeds and extracts carry real risks: they can interact with medications and, taken improperly, may cause neurological symptoms or bleeding. In that sense, ginkgo is like many venerable plants: part medicine, part marketing, and best approached with respect and evidence.

Poets and writers, meanwhile, have used the ginkgo leaf as a symbol of duality and unity:

Two lobes joined at a single stem.

Two halves of a story, past and present held in one fan of tissue.

When you hold a leaf up to the light you can see its veins radiating out like a little river delta, each line carrying water and memory to the edges.

Rick’s Commentary

All of this - the fossil record, the mistranscribed name, the temple courtyards, the Hiroshima saplings - exists inside the ordinary tree at the end of my street.

Most days, the neighbors don’t think about that. They park under it, walk their dogs past it, grumble about the leaves that clog the storm drain.

Children collect the prettiest fans and press them in heavy books.

I sometimes imagine that if you could speed up time, you’d see houses appear and vanish, cars change shape and color, fashions flicker by, while the ginkgo simply thickens its trunk and extends its branches, patient as geology.

There is something comforting in that slow perspective.

In a world that feels permanently urgent, the ginkgo is not in a hurry.

It has outlived empires, ice ages, and one very bad day in Hiroshima.

And yet, for a few weeks each year, it offers us a very human gift. An extravagant, unnecessary display of beauty. It trades its modest green cloak for a robe of gold and throws the whole thing at our feet.

We call it Ginkgo because of a three-hundred-year-old spelling mistake. The tree, I suspect, doesn’t mind. It just keeps doing what it has always done - quietly stitching the deep past to the present, one fan-shaped leaf at a time.

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