The Ginkgos of the Botanical Garden

Bucharest's Botanical Garden protects four ginkgo trees as a group, 200 metres inside its main entrance, under the local nickname arborii pagodelor, the pagoda trees, a label more commonly attached to an entirely different species, the Japanese pagoda tree. Ginkgo biloba earned the borrowed name anyway, probably because its fan-shaped leaves and East Asian origin read as pagoda-adjacent to whoever named it first, and the name stuck regardless of the mismatch. The garden itself dates to 1860, moving to its current site on the edge of the Cotroceni district in 1884, and functions as the University of Bucharest's living plant collection rather than a public park in the ordinary sense, which is part of why these four trees have survived largely undisturbed while so many of the capital's older street and park trees have not. No record gives an exact planting date for the group, but ginkgo has been standard in serious botanical collections since the 18th century, and a garden built to university academic standards from the 1880s onward is exactly the kind of institution that would have planted one of the world's oldest surviving tree lineages among its founding specimens rather than adding it later as decoration.