The Ginkgo of Botanisk Hage

Norway's oldest botanical garden, founded in 1814 on land the newly created University of Oslo assigned to its first botany professor, Christen Smith, holds what its own museum believes to be the oldest ginkgo tree anywhere in Northern Europe. It was planted in 1870 behind what would become the Victoria House, a tropical glasshouse built six years later specifically to grow and display the enormous Victoria water lily, and the ginkgo has spent the century and a half since then growing into the garden's largest specimen of its kind. Ginkgo biloba survived essentially unchanged for over 200 million years in the fossil record before nearly disappearing everywhere except a few pockets of China, which is why Europeans often call it a living fossil or, in Norwegian, a temple tree, a name reflecting the species' long cultivation around Buddhist and Confucian temple grounds in East Asia. The Victoria House itself marked its 150th anniversary in 2026, a reminder that even the garden's celebrated glasshouse is younger than the tree growing quietly behind it. Ginkgos are famously resistant to pollution, pests and disease, among the reasons this one has outlasted several rebuilding phases of the garden around it since 1870.