The Ginkgo of the Oude Hortus

Woodpeckers have worked this ginkgo's upper crown for years, and the Dutch national monumental tree register still calls its trunk sound underneath the damage: a three-stemmed specimen planted in 1896 close to the facade of what was then the university's Botanical Laboratory, since replaced by a newer building. The register rates it the thickest ginkgo growing anywhere in the city of Groningen. Ginkgo biloba is a living fossil in the least metaphorical sense available, the last surviving species of a plant family that predates most of the trees around it by tens of millions of years, easy to spot by fan-shaped leaves unlike any other tree's. This one stands roughly a hundred and thirty years old, planted twenty years after the plane and the weeping beech elsewhere in the same garden, during the Oude Hortus's working life as the university's botanical teaching collection. The garden itself dates to 1626, founded by the apothecary Henricus Munting, and kept functioning as a research and teaching ground until 1967, when the university's living plant collection moved out to Hortus Haren and left this walled plot as the public garden it remains today. Free, roughly twenty minutes on foot from Centraal station.