The ginkgo has no living relatives. This page maps every ginkgo on the site, 33 so far across 24 cities.
Its family goes back over 200 million years, so far that when the first botanists examined one they were looking at a tree older than flowers; everything else in its lineage is fossil. It nearly vanished too, surviving in Chinese temple grounds until monks and then Dutch traders carried it around the world. It is almost comically hard to kill: six ginkgos stood within two kilometres of the Hiroshima blast and all six leafed the following spring. Cities love it for that same stubbornness, and every November it pays them back, dropping all its golden fan-shaped leaves at once, sometimes in a single day. The ginkgos mapped so far run from Tokyo's shrine giants to the first European imports, oldest first.
Penha de França. Ginkgo biloba is often called a living fossil, a species virtually unchanged for over 200 million years and one of the very few plants known to have resprouted near ground zero at Hiroshima, a resilience the species carries in its reputation rather than this particular tree's own biography.
Monteverde / Trastevere. Rome's most famous old trees are cedars and planes, planted by cardinals and popes on grand estates.
Asakusa, Taito. This ginkgo used to be a national treasure and technically is not one anymore, and the reason why says everything about it.
Motoazabu, Minato. The upside-down tree Tokyo never quite got over.
Hibiya, Chiyoda. An engineer once bet his own head on this tree's survival, and won.
Shiba Park, Minato. A shogun planted this tree with his own hands, or so Shiba Toshogu has claimed for almost four centuries.
Hakusan, Bunkyo. In 1896, a botanist working under this tree changed what science understood about how plants reproduce.
Kitaaoyama, Minato. Every one of these 146 ginkgo trees was already a young adult when it was planted.
Shimogyo-ku. This ginkgo grows low and wide rather than tall, its heaviest branches spreading outward close to the ground before the trunk narrows above them, an arrangement that from certain angles makes the whole tree look planted upside down, roots reaching for the sky.
Zuid / Centrum. Antwerp's first public park has spent the last forty years quietly losing the very trees that made it worth designating in the first place.
Hietzing, 13th district. This is one tree with two sexes.
Innere Stadt / Landstraße border, Stadtpark. Vienna's other great ginkgo does not get the attention Schönbrunn's does, despite standing a five minute walk from the cathedral.
Bubenec. Two very different ages have been written down for this tree, 80 years apart, and nobody has reconciled them.
Britz, Neukölln. Berlin's oldest and tallest ginkgo survived something most of its European relatives never had to: being fashionable.
Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo. Ten of these ginkgos are Seville survivors from a delivery of twenty-five.
Piazzale Michelangelo, Oltrarno. Millions of people photograph the view from Piazzale Michelangelo every year, and almost none of them photograph the tree they are standing under to do it.
Brera. Behind Palazzo Brera's courtyard grows a pair of trees older than the idea of Italy itself: a male and a female ginkgo, planted together in 1775 when Empress Maria Theresa's new botanical garden was barely a year old, grown from seed carried directly from China less than two decades after the species had reached Europe at all.
L'Eixample. This ginkgo has survived every conflict Valencia has been through since the mid-19th century simply by belonging to a species built to survive almost anything.
Centro. This was the first ginkgo Granada ever grew, planted in 1889 in a garden that had itself only existed since 1840, on ground that used to be the vegetable orchard of a Jesuit college before the University of Granada's Faculty of Law took over the site.
Irnerio. Bologna's botanical garden traces its founding to 1568, when the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi established it as one of the earliest such gardens anywhere in Europe, decades before ginkgo itself had even reached the continent.
Galvani. Piazza Cavour was Bologna's first deliberately designed public garden-square, laid out by the Turin architect Pietro Ceri in the years after Italian unification cut new streets through the city's medieval fabric, and this ginkgo has stood in it since roughly that original planting, around 150 years now.
Citta Antica. Verona's official monumental-tree register lists this ginkgo as a group rather than a single trunk, an average circumference of 323cm and average height of 23.5 metres across the specimens growing together in Piazza Indipendenza, sharing the same small garden as the square's much taller plane tree.
Trsteno. A botanical survey of Trsteno Arboretum identifies eight trees as the collection's oldest documented specimens, each with a planting date recorded to the year rather than estimated from growth rings, and this ginkgo, planted in 1858, is one of two of its kind on that list.
Toyen. Norway's oldest botanical garden, founded in 1814 on land the newly created University of Oslo assigned to its first botany professor, Christen Smith, holds what its own museum believes to be the oldest ginkgo tree anywhere in Northern Europe.
Binnenstad. A ginkgo is either male or female for its entire life, except this one, which has been both since sometime in the 19th century, when a gardener grafted a female branch onto the male trunk so the tree could finally produce the seeds its species is famous for.
Binnenstad-Noord. The oldest tree in Noorderplantsoen is not a native Dutch species at all.
Academiewijk. Planted in 1785, this ginkgo spent a century and a half as what botanists call, without much romance, a male specimen, producing only the small catkins that never make seed.
City centre. One ginkgo in a Nijmegen park quietly created a plant variety now sold across Europe.
Grad (Old Town). Split's own park authority has only ever given one tree its highest rarity grade, and it stands a few steps from the busiest gate of Diocletian's Palace.
Cotroceni. Bucharest's Botanical Garden protects four ginkgo trees as a group, 200 metres inside its main entrance, under the local nickname arborii pagodelor, the pagoda trees, a label more commonly attached to an entirely different species, the Japanese pagoda tree.
Siheung-dong. Five roads meet at a point in Geumcheon-gu named, quite literally, Ginkgo Tree Intersection, and the trees that gave it the name are still standing at the center of it.
Banghak-dong. When Seoul designated its very first protected tree in 1968, officials wrote down its age as 830 years.
Myeongnyun-dong. In 1519, Sungkyunkwan's head instructor Yun Tak planted this ginkgo for a very specific reason: shade for the students memorizing Confucian classics in the courtyard below, and, tradition says, because ginkgos rarely catch fire, a reassuring quality beside wooden lecture halls.
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