The Ginkgo of Park Oliwski

For about a week each autumn this tree empties itself. Ginkgos turn uniformly gold and then drop the whole crown almost at once, sometimes inside two days, and for that week the ground underneath it is the reason to come. The rest of the year it is a straight, quiet tree with a trunk 201 centimetres round and 20 metres of height, standing in the corner of Park Oliwski that was worked up into a dendrological collection. Poland entered it on the central register of natural monuments on 15 March 1992 as number 833, the same day it registered the European larch and the Weymouth pine growing a few paces away. Ginkgo biloba is the last species of an entire order of plants. Its relatives were widespread before flowering trees existed and then disappeared everywhere except a corner of China, and the species survives now largely because people kept planting it, which is exactly what happened here. Nobody wrote down when. The girth reads like a nineteenth or early twentieth century planting rather than anything ancient, but that is a judgement about a trunk, not a record, and we have found no document either way. If you know when this one went in, tell us.