The Tree That Outlived the Dinosaurs — and Nearly Vanished

Pressed between the pages of an old copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — a book read aloud by a grandmother, still living in her library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded White Rabbit. The writer who kept it remembers the afternoon she picked it up beneath four ancient ginkgo trees at the edge of the Black Sea, and remembers the gasp of it: the shock of seeing something so unlike her idea of a leaf, and then the revelation that anything — a leaf, a life — can take shapes far beyond the standard template. It can bend and broaden the Platonic ideal.

That those four Asian trees stood at all in Communist Bulgaria is a small echo of the ginkgo's own improbable story.

The ginkgo is Earth's oldest surviving tree genus. It was here before the dinosaurs, before Africa and South America pulled apart. In its Mesozoic heyday, as Jared Farmer tells it in Elderflora, the ginkgophytes were the foremost innovators of the plant kingdom — able to shed leaves in winter, go dormant in low light, switch between stub and branch growth as conditions demanded, resprout from energy-storing roots after any disturbance. On a young planet with few tall plants and no fast-growing flowers, these generalists ruled.

And then, slowly, they didn't. Darwin observed that "rarity precedes extinction," but he never said how long rarity might last. The ginkgo is the great exception. It survived multiple mass extinctions. It outlived the very animals that once spread its seeds — carrion-eaters, perhaps, drawn by the sweet-rotten smell of its fleshy seedcoats. Through the ice ages it dwindled to a single species, retreating from North America, then Europe, then Japan, until by the Pleistocene it was a mountain refugee in China, one lineage clinging on where the whole planet had once been its garden.

Its survival past that point was not evolution's doing. It was ours.

Buddhist monks found the last ginkgos in those Chinese mountains, prized them for medicine and for their strange beauty, and planted them around temples and shrines across Japan. There a German naturalist encountered one in Nagasaki and gave it, probably by a slip of the pen, the misspelled name Ginkgo — an error the printed word faithfully copied down the centuries, until Linnaeus himself enshrined the mistake in his taxonomy, filing the tree away among "obscure plants."

Obscure, but not for long. When Goethe met a ginkgo in a royal garden in 1815, its single leaf — one fan that seems both divided in two and joined as one — struck him as a perfect image for love and for the self. He wrote a poem, sent it in a letter to someone he may or may not have loved, and sealed it with a pressed ginkgo leaf:

Is it but one being single Which as same itself divides? Are there two which choose to mingle So that each as one now hides?

Goethe was the most famous poet in Europe, and his verses spread like nothing else could. A ginkgo craze swept the West. Horticulturalists and city planners saturated their parks with the tree — among them the Czech visionary who spent forty-two years building Bulgaria's Sea Garden, so that a century on a six-year-old girl could pick up a fallen leaf and be changed by it for life.

Meanwhile science was catching up to what the monks and poets had sensed. Scientists unearthed ginkgo fossils hundreds of millions of years old. In 1894 a Japanese botanist, watching under a microscope, saw a ginkgo sperm cell swim to the egg through fluid — a motility inherited from the ancient marine ancestry of all plants. The ginkgo was a living fossil, a missing link between ferns and conifers, reaching across deep time to touch the age of dinosaurs.

Here is what the whole long story bends toward. Six ginkgos were among the handful of living things to survive the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Oppenheimer have been pressed flat between the pages of history, those trees are still alive — rising from the wreckage of our capacity to destroy as an emblem of our capacity to save.

And that is the quiet argument the ginkgo makes with its very existence. A species that ruled the earth was reduced to a few trees on a mountain, and it endured not because it was fit, but because it was loved — because monks and poets and gardeners found it beautiful and chose to carry it forward. Salvation, whether of a species or a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation.

Each November the ginkgos let go. As Howard Nemerov saw, on a single mild night, near no frost at all, they drop every leaf at once —

In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind But as though to time alone.

A tree that has held on for two hundred million years, releasing everything in a single gold night. Holding on and letting go turn out to be the same wisdom, and the ginkgo has been practicing both longer than anything else alive.

Distilled from Brain Pickings