The Female Ginkgo of the Sot de la Masia

The historic botanical garden on Montjuic has three ginkgos, and this is the one that fruits. The two males stand down in the Sot de l'Estany; the female holds the central terrace of the Sot de la Masia, the second quarry pit, above the vegetable garden and a short climb from the big camphor tree. The garden's 2009 guide calls it a magnificent specimen and notes that it produces edible seeds, which is a polite way of saying that in autumn it drops fleshy fruit that smells of rancid butter, the reason most cities plant only males. The friends' association put it at about 70 years old and 12.5 metres in 2017, so it went in around the 1940s, when Antoni de Bolos was adding collections to a garden Pius Font i Quer had begun in 1930. Ginkgo is older than the dinosaurs that walked under it and survives today in the wild only in China, so a seed-bearing tree in a Barcelona quarry is a small outpost of a species that nearly did not make it. The best moment is the second half of November, when the whole crown goes gold at once against the dark hillside and then lets go within a week, carpeting the beds below. The farmhouse under the terrace was built as a model farm for the 1929 exhibition; the tree is younger than it.