The Ginkgo of the Hortus

Planted in 1785, this ginkgo spent a century and a half as what botanists call, without much romance, a male specimen, producing only the small catkins that never make seed. In 1935, gardeners grafted several female twigs onto its branches, cut from a ginkgo at Huis ten Donck, a country estate near Rotterdam. Only one graft took. It still lives today, a single genetically female branch grown into an otherwise male tree, and every autumn that one branch alone produces the species' distinctive plum-like seeds, whose fleshy coating gives off a smell closer to rancid butter than to fruit, an insect lure rather than a flaw. Ginkgo biloba is the sole surviving member of an entire plant order, its lineage traceable in the fossil record to roughly 270 million years ago, long before flowering plants existed at all, which makes this specific tree's mid-1930s surgery a strange collision of eras, a living fossil tinkered with using the grafting techniques of a 20th-century orchard. The Hortus built its greenhouse complex around the tree in 1938, close enough that the ginkgo effectively anchors the entire glasshouse wing rather than sitting apart from it.