The Bernhardstraße Ginkgo

The car park is gone and the ginkgo is protected. This gnarled, fan-crowned tree stands on a former parking lot on Bernhardstraße towards Habsburgerstraße, in a perfectly ordinary stretch of shops and flats, and Freiburg's council made it a natural monument on 28 January 2011, in a batch of ten. The local report on that decision called it markant and knorrig, striking and gnarled, and singled out the golden autumn foliage as something the street watches for. Ginkgo biloba is the last survivor of an order of trees that was widespread when dinosaurs were, and the fossil leaves are close enough to the living ones that you can match them by eye. It is also one of the toughest trees a European city can plant, largely indifferent to exhaust fumes, road salt and compacted ground, which is why so many end up on pavements and, evidently, car parks. Nobody has recorded when this one was planted or how thick it is. That is a genuine gap rather than a hedge, and it is the sort of thing a person with a tape measure could close in a minute. If that is you, tell us. One warning for cross-checkers: Freiburg has at least three registered ginkgos, so go by the street rather than the species. This is the Bernhardstraße one.