The Ginkgo of the Jardins de Mossen Cinto Verdaguer

The ginkgo has no living relatives. Not a rare genus inside a large family: the entire order it belongs to died out except for this one species, and fossil leaves from 200 million years ago are close enough to the modern ones that a botanist can match them by eye. It survived in a handful of Chinese temple groves and was carried out from there first by monks and then by European collectors. Barcelona's is a young example, planted in 1958 in the Jardins de Mossen Cinto Verdaguer on the Montjuic hillside, now 17 metres tall with a crown nearly as wide and a trunk 1.4 metres around. The garden it stands in is the city's bulb garden, terraced and best known for its tulips and narcissi in spring and its water lilies in summer, which leaves the ginkgo the autumn entirely to itself. That is the month worth coming for. The leaves turn from green to a flat butter yellow over about a fortnight, then drop almost all at once, often within a single still day, leaving a gold circle on the ground that is the entire point of the tree. The city catalogued it in 1998. The gardens are free and open daily.