The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden

Madeira's official register of monumental trees records this ginkgo for exactly one reason, size, and where the age should go it says sem referencia, no reference. Nobody has dated it. What the surveyors did measure is 18 metres of height and a trunk 1.62 metres round, which is a substantial specimen of a tree that has no obvious business thriving at this latitude and manages it anyway. Ginkgo biloba is the last species left of an entire lineage, with no close living relative anywhere, and it reached European gardens only in the eighteenth century. This one grows in the Jardim Botanico da Madeira on the slope above Funchal, among roughly 3,000 species pulled in from every continent the garden could reach, ten minutes out of the city by bus or a cable car ride down from Monte. The garden opened to the public in 1960, which dates the garden and not the tree. Nobody has recorded when this ginkgo went in. If you have a planting record, or a girth measured more recently than the survey, send it to us. And then in November the crown turns butter gold and drops the lot inside a few days, which is the week to be standing under it.