The Ginkgo of Villa del Grumello

This ginkgo and the cedar a short walk away were almost certainly planted by the same person in the same decade. The Italian tree register dates the ginkgo at roughly 146 years and the cedar at roughly 156, which for ages estimated rather than counted is the same answer twice. Somebody was landscaping the Grumello grounds in the 1870s and buying the fashionable things. Ginkgo was exactly that. Europe had only had the tree since the 1730s, when seed reached Dutch collectors from Japanese temple gardens, and by the mid nineteenth century no serious villa garden was without one. This one went in beside the greenhouses, where the estate kept the plants that needed help surviving the winter. The ginkgo needed none. It is among the toughest trees in cultivation, which is how a species that had spent millions of years in the fossil record ended up in every second European park. Its trunk is now around four metres in circumference: 390 centimetres in the national register, roughly four metres in the provincial survey. In November the whole crown goes gold and then drops, often inside a couple of days. Access is the catch. The park is free but opens on Sundays and weekdays only, on a set schedule that ends in the late afternoon, and never on Saturdays.