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, standing on a lawn beside the McGill law faculty. Suzanne Hardy's case for it is partly the tree and partly who put it there. She believes it is likely the first ginkgo of its kind planted in Montreal, and that it went in about 120 years ago 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 the tree and the mountain above it come from the same drawing office. Six of the seven trees on this page are up on that hill. This one waits at the bottom of it. The age is her estimate rather than a measurement. Nobody has published a girth, there is no plaque, and the pin marks the corner of Peel Street and Doctor Penfield Avenue rather than the trunk itself; the Chancellor Day Hall grounds are open to walk through and it is not a large lawn. Ginkgos are the last surviving species of an order that otherwise ended with the dinosaurs, and they keep the habits. This one holds its leaves green into late autumn, turns them a hard uniform yellow, then drops very nearly the whole crown inside a couple of days. Arrive in the wrong week and you get a green tree or a bare one.