The Ginkgo of Mgr. Nolenspark

The Dutch register that protects this tree calls it a Japanse notenboom, literally a Japanese nut tree, which is simply the ordinary Dutch name for a ginkgo and has nothing to do with what it actually is. A ginkgo is not a nut tree in any real sense. It is the sole survivor of a whole order of plants that otherwise vanished tens of millions of years ago, a living link to trees that grew alongside dinosaurs and outlasted them. This particular specimen is comparatively young. The national monumental tree register dates it to sometime between 1910 and 1920, which puts it at around a hundred and ten years old, the municipality as its owner, and open access for visitors. A ginkgo of that age has already seen the species become one of the most planted street trees on earth, prized for surviving pollution, disease and, most famously, six specimens close to the blast at Hiroshima that leafed out again the following spring. It stands in Monseigneur Nolenspark, in the stretch of Maastricht Stadspark that Lievin Rosseels laid out in 1886, sharing its hundred metres of ground with the park's own black walnuts, weeping silver limes and tulip trees. The register is the only source naming a ginkgo at this exact spot, so the page says that plainly rather than borrowing the measurements of two other Maastricht ginkgos documented elsewhere in the wider park. They are not this tree.