Trsteno's Ginkgo

A botanical survey of Trsteno Arboretum identifies eight trees as the collection's oldest documented specimens, each with a planting date recorded to the year rather than estimated from growth rings, and this ginkgo, planted in 1858, is one of two of its kind on that list. Ginkgo biloba is sometimes called a living fossil, a species whose basic form has barely changed across more than 200 million years of fossil record, old enough to have grown alongside dinosaurs, which makes a specimen planted only in the 19th century a relative newcomer by the standards of its own genealogy even as it becomes one of the oldest trees on these particular grounds. It was planted a few decades after Trsteno's own arboretum had already been developing for more than three centuries, part of a wave of exotic introductions to the garden's collection during the 19th century that also brought a second ginkgo in 1861, an American linden the same year as this one, and the yew and persimmon still growing nearby. Ginkgos are famously resistant to disease, pests and pollution, and unlike many of the collection's more delicate Mediterranean and subtropical specimens, this one has needed comparatively little intervention to reach the arboretum's list of oldest survivors.