The Bonsai Ginkgo of Na Slupi

A tree five metres tall with the trunk of one twice that height has been interfered with. The ginkgo by the greenhouse door in the Charles University botanical garden measures about 343 centimetres around at chest height and goes almost nowhere upward, spreading and drooping instead, and the accepted explanation is that somebody grew it in a barrel and pruned it like a bonsai for years before it was ever put in the ground. It carries its own cultivar name, 'Praga', probably descended from the weeping 'Pendula'. It went in around 1860 to 1870, which means it was standing here before the garden was laid out around it. Czech readers may know its outline without knowing the tree, because a ginkgo leaf is the emblem of Jaroslav Foglar's 1965 novel Stinadla se bouri and this specimen is the one usually credited with the idea, though the older ginkgo in Riegrovy sady has a claim too and Foglar never settled it. Prague listed it as a significant tree in 2013. In November the whole low crown turns one flat yellow and lets go inside a week, which on a tree this wide leaves a ring of leaves on the grass rather than a drift.