The Ginkgo of Parc d'Egmont

This ginkgo is being slowly harmed by people who like it. It is the seventh thickest of its species recorded anywhere in the Brussels region, 3.27 metres around and twenty metres tall, and it stands on open grass in the only public park inside the old city walls that sits entirely in the middle of a block, invisible from every street around it. That makes it the obvious place to lie down on a warm afternoon, and enough people have lain under this particular tree that the soil over its roots is packed hard, which is why the region's surveyors record its condition as slightly defective despite it being, for a ginkgo, extremely young. Ginkgos are the last survivors of a lineage that was already ancient when the first flowering plants appeared, and they are famous for shrugging off pollution, disease and radiation. Compacted ground is the one thing they do not shrug off. The reward for keeping a couple of metres back is in November, when the fan shaped leaves turn a uniform butter gold and then let go almost all at once, laying a circle of yellow on the grass. A walnut across the lawn turns at the same time, so the whole clearing goes yellow together.