The Mother Ginkgo of Kronenburgerpark

One ginkgo in a Nijmegen park quietly created a plant variety now sold across Europe. Sometime around 1930 a tree took root in Kronenburgerpark, laid out in 1881 and 1882 just outside the old city walls, and decades later a nurseryman noticed one of its branches growing in a strange, compact, witch's-broom tangle unlike the rest of the tree. Grafted, propagated and registered in 1995, that mutation became Ginkgo biloba 'Mariken', a dwarf ornamental cultivar now sold by nurseries well beyond the Netherlands and later awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, named after Mariken van Nieumeghen, the 16th-century Dutch morality play about a Nijmegen woman who makes a pact with the devil. The original tree that produced it is still standing in the park today, roughly 95 years old and about 2.85 metres around, ordinary in form itself even as its genetic accident spread to gardens it will never see. Ginkgo is a living fossil, a lineage that predates flowering plants by tens of millions of years and survived almost unchanged, which makes this park's real contribution almost funny: not the tree's age, but one freak branch that turned into a garden-centre product. Kronenburgerpark is free, central and a national monument in its own right, landscaped around what had recently been the city's demolished fortifications.