The Ginkgo of Tamanawa Shrine

Hiroshima's famous ginkgos are the ones near the hypocentre that came back into leaf the spring after 1945. This is not one of them. It stands well north of the centre, in the hills of Kabe-cho on the grounds of Tamanawa Shrine, and its claim is a quieter one: 3.27 metres round, in good health, recorded by the Environment Ministry's giant-tree survey in the year 2000 and by nothing else we have been able to find. Ginkgo biloba is the last species of the last family of an order that otherwise stopped existing. Its nearest living relatives are the conifers, at a distance of a couple of hundred million years, and it survived to the present largely because monks and priests in China and Japan kept planting it on temple and shrine ground long before any European had seen one. Old ginkgos in Japan stand almost exclusively where this one stands: on sacred ground, near a hall, because somebody wanted it there. Nobody wrote down when. Two searches for Tamanawa Shrine produced postal listings and nothing else, so the tree's age is simply unknown, and so is whatever history the shrine has with it. If you know either, tell us. What is not in doubt is November. A ginkgo does not colour gradually. It holds green, turns the whole crown at once, and drops the lot within days, and for the week before that it is unmistakable from halfway down the valley.