The Ginkgo of the Jardim das Virtudes

Portugal's tree register lists this ginkgo at 35.5 metres, which makes it taller than almost anything else growing in central Porto, and the people who have watched it longest call it the Rainha das Virtudes, the Queen of the Virtudes. It stands in the Jardim das Virtudes, on the terraced slope above the Douro, where the ground falls away steeply enough that you see the whole crown at once from below rather than craning up through it. The register put its age at roughly 200 years when it was measured in 2004, and recorded a trunk 4.3 metres around and a crown spreading 17 metres. It was formally declared a tree of public interest in January 2005. Ginkgo biloba is the last surviving member of an order of plants that was widespread when dinosaurs were, and it survives in cultivation largely because temple gardeners in China and Japan kept planting it long after it had all but vanished in the wild. What that lineage does in Porto is turn, hard, in the first week of December. Portuguese tree-watchers have documented it going gold in the same few days two years running, and the display lasts about a week before the leaves drop more or less at once. Come in late November or early December, or come another time and see a very large tree.