The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden

Bologna's botanical garden traces its founding to 1568, when the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi established it as one of the earliest such gardens anywhere in Europe, decades before ginkgo itself had even reached the continent. This specimen, an old female tree with a trunk 80cm across, came later, among the first ginkgos planted anywhere in Italy after the species reached European cultivation in the 18th century, brought from a mountainous pocket of southeast China where it had survived, essentially unchanged, for some 200 million years. It now dominates the garden's front section along Via Irnerio, included on the Emilia-Romagna region's own list of protected monumental trees for its size and age within a collection built primarily around gymnosperms, cone-bearing trees, from across Europe and Asia. Ginkgo biloba is famously resistant to disease, pollution and even fire in a way few other large trees can match, a resilience this specimen shares with every ginkgo on this list without needing any specific incident to prove it.