The Ginkgo of Villa Geno

This ginkgo is male, which in this species is a decision rather than an accident. Female trees drop a fleshy seed that smells like something died in the flowerbed, so parks that want the autumn colour without the complaints plant males, and the nursery trade has propagated them from cuttings for over a century. The colour is the reason to come. Ginkgo leaves hold their green late, then go to a flat butter gold across the whole crown at once, usually in November here, and drop within a day or two of each other. Twenty metres of that standing over a lakeside clearing justifies the walk out along Viale Geno. The tree is roughly a hundred years old according to the provincial survey that recorded it, which puts its planting in the villa's first decades as public property. Como took over Villa Geno, its park and its promenade in 1911. On girth the sources do not quite agree: the national monumental register has 312 centimetres, the provincial survey about three metres flat, close but not the same measurement, and we have flagged that rather than pick one. The species has been around long enough not to care. Ginkgo biloba is the last surviving member of an order of plants that predates flowering trees entirely.