The Ginkgo of Stromovka

Two very different ages have been written down for this tree, 80 years apart, and nobody has reconciled them. One record dates its planting to around 1804, from the earliest landscaping of the royal nursery here under the gardener Fuchs. A separate 2016 assessment put its age at only around 130 years. Both figures come from people who study this specific tree, and the gap between them is wide enough that this page states the honest range rather than pick a side: somewhere between 140 and 220 years old. What is not in dispute is the tree itself, a male ginkgo with a trunk 362 centimetres around and a crown 16 metres wide, growing near the old Mistodrzitelsky letohradek, the former Governor's Summer House, in a corner of Stromovka that used to be a nursery bed. Ginkgos are sometimes called living fossils because the species has barely changed in over 200 million years, and this one is among the oldest specimens in the Czech Republic regardless of which age estimate is correct. Prague declared it a protected memorial tree in 2004. Every November its fan shaped leaves turn a single uniform gold and drop within days, the trick every ginkgo performs.