The Ginkgo Grove of the Real Alcázar

Ten of these ginkgos are Seville survivors from a delivery of twenty-five. The trees arrived at the Real Alcázar in the autumn and winter of 1910, part of a shipment from the Royal Site of La Granja de San Ildefonso near Segovia, sent south to plant the palace's new English Garden, a cooler, shadier counterpoint to the clipped Andalusi courtyards elsewhere in the grounds. Fifteen didn't survive more than a century of Seville's dry heat, a climate ginkgos tolerate poorly compared to the temperate gardens they came from. The ten that did are now among the oldest ginkgos in Andalusia, and every December and January they do something nothing else in the garden does: every leaf turns the same intense yellow within days of each other, a uniform gold that stands out hard against the evergreen palms, cypresses and citrus around it. The species survived in the wild only in a few restricted pockets of China, kept alive for centuries as a sacred tree in Chinese and Japanese temple gardens before European botanists began exporting it in the 18th century. Its old Chinese name means duck's foot, a reference to the fan-shaped leaf that later inspired Goethe to write an entire poem about the tree's paired, seemingly single lobes. The Alcázar's ginkgos arrived almost a century after Goethe wrote it, foreign transplants in a garden that was already centuries old by the time they showed up.