The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden

This was the first ginkgo Granada ever grew, planted in 1889 in a garden that had itself only existed since 1840, on ground that used to be the vegetable orchard of a Jesuit college before the University of Granada's Faculty of Law took over the site. Ginkgo biloba is the last living member of a plant order that once grew across the entire planet during the age of dinosaurs, a lineage so isolated botanists sometimes call it a living fossil, and this specimen's fan-shaped leaves, turning a uniform gold each November, still look almost identical to fossil ginkgo leaves more than 200 million years old. The species is famous for a harder kind of survival too: six ginkgos within roughly a mile of Hiroshima's atomic bomb epicentre lived through the blast and are still growing today, a fact this specimen's own garden plaque, next to a poem written for the tree by the Granada poet Elena Martin Vivaldi, does not fail to mention. The garden is open to the public on university working days, free of charge, tucked behind the Faculty of Law's own building in the city centre.