The McGill Law Ginkgo

Asked to name the most remarkable tree in Montreal, a botanist who has spent twenty-five years looking for them picked this one, on a lawn beside the McGill law faculty. Suzanne Hardy believes it is likely the first ginkgo of its kind planted in Montreal, at the hands of the Olmsted family. Frederick Law Olmsted laid out Mont-Royal Park, the hill this ginkgo sits at the foot of, so tree and mountain share a designer. Six of the trees on this page are up on that hill; this one waits at the bottom, on the same McGill campus as three more. The city's own heritage register for the mountain independently names the same tree: said to have been planted in 1892, the year Chancellor Day Hall itself, then a private house, went up beside it, putting the ginkgo at roughly 134 years rather than the round hundred-twenty a botanist once guessed. The register also measures what nobody had, a trunk 123 centimetres across, about 386 around. The pin marks the corner of Peel Street and Doctor Penfield Avenue, not the trunk; the grounds are open to walk through and it is not a large lawn. Ginkgos are the last survivors of an order that otherwise ended with the dinosaurs, and they keep the habits: green leaves held into late autumn, a hard uniform yellow, then nearly the whole crown dropped inside a couple of days. Arrive in the wrong week and you get a green tree or a bare one.