The Ginkgo of the Jardin Public

The French name for a ginkgo is the forty crown tree, after an 18th-century collector in Montpellier said to have paid forty ecus for a single sapling when the species had just reached Europe from China by way of the Netherlands and England. At that price it was less a tree than a status object. This one is now 27 metres tall with a crown 27 metres across and 405 centimetres around the trunk, which is as wide as any ginkgo in Bordeaux's register. It is protected twice over, once as a remarkable tree and once under the city's urban plan. Ginkgo biloba is the last survivor of a plant family older than the flowering plants and older than any bird. Every specimen in Europe descends from trees kept alive in Chinese temple grounds long after the species had vanished from the wild. This individual has no published age, and nobody has recorded whether it is male or female, which matters more than it sounds: female trees drop a fleshy seed that smells like something died. A Bordeaux blogger writes most autumns about the gold carpet under a ginkgo in this garden. That post gives no coordinates, so read it as the species doing what it does here rather than proof about this exact trunk. The gold is real either way, and it lasts about a week.