The Three-Trunked Ginkgo

Lightning took this tree down after the war and it came back as three. The ginkgo planted here in 1862 was struck in the post-war years and thrown into regrowth, and the garden let three of the resulting shoots run. They are now three full trunks of one tree, twenty-six metres tall, which is why the national register, which lists a trunk girth for almost everything it protects, leaves the figure blank for this one. There is no single trunk to measure. Ginkgo biloba is the last species of an entire order of plants, with no living relative closer than the conifers, and fossils of nearly identical leaves come out of rock two hundred million years old. It survives what other trees do not: it was among the first things to grow back near the epicentre at Hiroshima, and the trick on display here, rebuilding itself from a wrecked base, is the same trait. Come in the middle of November. The garden treats the turn as one of its events of the year, when the leaves go from green to a hard uniform yellow and then drop, often most of them within a day or two, leaving a gold floor and a bare tree above it.