Bartram's Ginkgo

In 1785, William Hamilton shipped three ginkgo saplings from London, the first of their kind to reach North America. He planted two at his own estate, The Woodlands, and gave the third to his friend William Bartram, whose garden a few miles up the Schuylkill was already the oldest botanic garden on the continent. Hamilton's two are gone, felled in the 1980s. Bartram's is the one that made it. That leaves this tree, standing east of the old barn on the same ground Bartram himself planted, as the oldest ginkgo known in America at roughly 240 years old. It is male, which spares the garden a problem: ginkgoes are dioecious, and only the females drop the soft, foul-smelling seed that gives the species its reputation at street level. Whoever decided which sapling went where left Bartram with the tidier tree. The 1785 date is well attested. Wikipedia and the garden's own institutional history agree closely on it, though both likely trace back to the same original record rather than two truly independent counts, worth knowing before treating the figure as beyond question. No exact coordinates for the trunk have ever been published, so the pin here marks the general area rather than the base of the tree itself. Bartram's Garden is free, city owned, and open every day from dawn to dusk.