The Ginkgo of Praça Paiva Couceiro

Ginkgo biloba is often called a living fossil, a species virtually unchanged for over 200 million years and one of the very few plants known to have resprouted near ground zero at Hiroshima, a resilience the species carries in its reputation rather than this particular tree's own biography. Lisbon's specimen in Praça Paiva Couceiro, in the working class Penha de França neighbourhood, is a comparatively young member of an ancient lineage: over a century old and classified as a tree of public interest, though nobody has pinned down its exact planting date. Its fan shaped leaves turn a uniform bright yellow every November before dropping almost simultaneously, a spectacle unrelated to anything else on this list and one that draws a small annual crowd of photographers to an otherwise unremarkable square. Ginkgos are dioecious, male or female, and only female trees produce the notoriously foul smelling fruit; whether this one has simply spared the neighbourhood that autumn hazard, or its sex was never recorded, nobody seems to know. Either way, it is Penha de França's one living link to a genus older than most of the world's mountain ranges.