The Ginkgo of Muinkpark

Flanders' heritage inventory still files this tree under its old Dutch name, Japanse notenboom, the Japanese nut tree, which gets it wrong twice. Ginkgo biloba comes from China, and the thing it drops in autumn is a seed, not a nut. The name stuck anyway, which is more or less what happened to the tree. It belongs to the first planting generation of the ground the Ghent natural history society bought in 1851 to build a zoo on. The zoo went. The ginkgo stayed exactly where it was put, and the register records its trunk at over three metres round. Ginkgo is the last surviving species of an order otherwise known from fossils, with no close living relatives anywhere, and the leaf shows it: a flat green fan with a notch in the middle, unlike anything else growing in this park. For most of the year that is the only reason to look twice. Then late November arrives, the whole crown turns hard yellow at once, holds for a week or so, and comes down almost in a single day. The register names a planting generation rather than a year, so the age is a band rather than a figure. It stands roughly a hundred metres from the ash and the weeping lime that went into the ground with it.