The Ginkgo of the Agriculture Gardens

Every other tree in this garden has living relatives. This one has none. Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving species of an entire order of plants, and the fan-shaped leaf you pick up under it is the same shape found pressed into rock from two hundred million years ago. Cordoba's catalogue of singular trees calls this the oldest ginkgo in the city's public gardens and put it at about seventy-two years when it was surveyed, a figure no independent source has ever checked. What other sources do confirm is which tree is meant: the garden's local history pages name it, and a geocache placed at its foot carries its name and is still listed as active, which is a small modern receipt that it is still standing. The Jardines de la Agricultura opened in 1811 and nobody in Cordoba calls them that. They are Los Patos, after the duck pond. A ginkgo of seventy is barely started by the standards of a species that routinely passes a thousand years in China and Japan, so this is an early chapter rather than a veteran. Come in late autumn. Ginkgo leaves turn a uniform gold and then release almost in unison, so the tree goes from lit to bare in a few days, and on the best of those days the gold is on the branches and on the ground at the same time.