The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden

Every other tree on this walk came to Naples as a novelty from somewhere far away. This one is a survivor from somewhere far back. Ginkgo biloba is the last living member of a lineage that covered the planet before flowering plants existed, and it now grows wild in two small pockets of eastern China and nowhere else on earth. Everything else its family ever produced is a fossil, which is why the garden's own notes call it a living one. The specimen here is three metres round and sixteen tall, and the national and regional registers agree on both figures exactly. Its age is recorded as more than a hundred years and nothing tighter, because nobody planted it with a note. Come in the second half of November. Ginkgo leaves are small stiff fans, split down the middle, held on long stalks, and they do not fade through brown the way most leaves do. They go from green to a flat saturated yellow, hold it for roughly a fortnight, and then let go, often most of the tree inside a day or two after the first hard night. What is left is a gold circle on the ground the exact width of the crown, which is worth the walk on its own. The garden singles the leaves out as its reason to visit in winter.