Autumn colour
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 resi...
Ginkgo
Ginkgo biloba
The ginkgo has no living relatives. We map 110 of them, in 80 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.
Lisbon
New York
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For almost forty years New York's official list of its Great Trees did not change.
Tokyo
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Lightning split this ginkgo about six metres up, and the tree answered by pushing a crowd of new trunks out of its own base.
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This ginkgo used to be a national treasure and technically is not one anymore, and the reason why says everything about it.
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The upside-down tree Tokyo never quite got over.
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The air raids of 1945 took the shrine, its halls and its other old trees.
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Edo-period women came here to put their arms around this trunk, and people still do.
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An engineer once bet his own head on this tree's survival, and won.
Photo: Mark Yasuda (Myasuda) (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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A shogun planted this tree with his own hands, or so Shiba Toshogu has claimed for almost four centuries.
Photo: Reggaeman (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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In 1896, a botanist working under this tree changed what science understood about how plants reproduce.
Photo: LBM1948 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Every one of these 146 ginkgo trees was already a young adult when it was planted.
Photo: Kentin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Paris
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In French this is the tree of forty crowns, the arbre aux quarante ecus, a folk name that by tradition goes back to the price a Parisian once paid for the first ginkgos brought into France.
Fukuoka
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A 1913 stone monument at the foot of this ginkgo already declared it over a thousand years old, and the monument itself is now old enough to be doubted along with the tree.
Photo: Hirho (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On the fifth of October, seven priests climb in with bamboo poles and shake this tree until the nuts come down.
Photo: Hirho (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Seville
Ten of these ginkgos are Seville survivors from a delivery of twenty-five.
Photo: Juan carlos boza (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Montreal
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Asked to name the most remarkable tree in Montreal, a botanist who has spent twenty-five years looking for them picked this one, on a lawn beside the McGill law faculty.
Milan
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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 wa...
Photo: codrin_bucur (CC BY 4.0)
Rome
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Rome's most famous old trees are cedars and planes, planted by cardinals and popes on grand estates.
Photo: Carlo8688 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Prague
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Two very different ages have been written down for this tree, 80 years apart, and nobody has reconciled them.
Photo: MartinVeselka (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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A tree five metres tall with the trunk of one twice that height has been interfered with.
Photo: Huhulenik (CC BY 3.0)
Kyoto
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The guardians at this shrine gate are wild boars rather than the usual stone lion-dogs, and the tree behind them is the tallest thing on the grounds.
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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 w...
Photo: そらみみ (Soramimi) (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The gate this ginkgo stands at is named after a dog and a boar.
Berlin
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Berlin's oldest and tallest ginkgo survived something most of its European relatives never had to: being fashionable.
Photo: Barfisch (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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The Humboldt University keeps two protected ginkgos, one in each of its courtyards, and Berlin registers them as two separate natural monuments.
Krakow
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Three trunks rise from a single base on ul.
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Nobody has measured this ginkgo's age, but its trunk gives away that it is old enough to fruit, a milestone the species does not reach for about forty years.
Leipzig
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A female ginkgo stands at the corner of Karl-Heine-Strasse in Plagwitz, one of 148 trees Leipzig protects as a Naturdenkmal, Saxon law's strongest individual-tree designation.
Photo: Edlerin (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Three records give this ginkgo three heights: 15 metres, 20 and 24.
Vienna
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This is one tree with two sexes.
Photo: Wolfgang H. Wögerer, Wien, Austria (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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Vienna's other great ginkgo does not get the attention Schönbrunn's does, despite standing a five minute walk from the cathedral.
Photo: GuentherZ (CC BY 3.0)
Barcelona
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The ginkgo has no living relatives.
Florence
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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.
Photo: PROPOLI87 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Valencia
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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.
Photo: Joanbanjo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Copenhagen
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This ginkgo is male, and the female it pollinates lives on the other side of the street.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Brussels
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This ginkgo is being slowly harmed by people who like it.
Antwerp
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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.
Bucharest
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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...
Naples
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Every other tree on this walk came to Naples as a novelty from somewhere far away.
Warsaw
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The Warsaw University Botanical Garden protects twenty three trees as natural monuments under one legal designation from 1974, and this ginkgo is one of them, planted in 1824 in a garden that had a...
Photo: Bobo-X (CC BY)
Bologna
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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...
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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 m...
Photo: Aneta Malinowska (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Turin
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Sixty metres from the plane stands a tree with no living relatives.
Photo: Matthewlunas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Groningen
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The oldest tree in Noorderplantsoen is not a native Dutch species at all.
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Woodpeckers have worked this ginkgo's upper crown for years, and the Dutch national monumental tree register still calls its trunk sound underneath the damage: a three-stemmed specimen planted in 1...
Philadelphia
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In 1785, William Hamilton shipped three ginkgo saplings from London, the first of their kind to reach North America.
Photo: Andrew Conboy (CC BY)
Gdansk
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For about a week each autumn this tree empties itself.
Maastricht
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The Dutch register that protects this tree calls it a Japanse notenboom, literally a Japanese nut tree, which is simply the ordinary Dutch name for a ginkgo and has nothing to do with what it actua...
Utrecht
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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 tr...
Photo: Hansmuller (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Seoul
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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.
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When Seoul designated its very first protected tree in 1968, officials wrote down its age as 830 years.
Photo: Mechurii (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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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, bec...
Padua
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Somebody grafted a female branch onto this male ginkgo in the middle of the 19th century, so one tree here sheds pollen in spring and drops fruit in autumn from the same trunk.
Photo: lejones417 (CC BY-SA)
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Padua's botanical garden has two ginkgos worth stopping for, and both carry the same odd trick: a female branch grafted onto a male tree, so a single trunk produces the messy, foul-smelling fruit t...
Porto
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 da...
Photo: Paulo V. Araujo, Dias com Arvores
Tallinn
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This tree gave the Estonian language a phrase.
Photo: 03jansa (CC BY-SA 3.0 ee)
Nijmegen
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One ginkgo in a Nijmegen park quietly created a plant variety now sold across Europe.
Taipei
This ginkgo does not turn gold until January.
Hiroshima
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This ginkgo grows roots out of its own branches.
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The 1943 flood carried off the shrine's torii gate.
Teramachi means temple town, and it is a single street of them, laid out when the Asano lords moved Hiroshima's temples together in the seventeenth century so they would form a defensive line along...
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Shukkeien was made in 1620, the year after Asano Nagaakira came to Hiroshima, as the lord's garden beside his castle.
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In 1990 this temple built a new gate and cut a hole in the roof so the tree could carry on through it.
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Hiroshima's famous ginkgos are the ones near the hypocentre that came back into leaf the spring after 1945.
Oslo
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 o...
Photo: Ingar Sørensen
Beijing
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Two female ginkgos stand either side of the Diamond Throne pagoda, and every November people queue to photograph them.
Leiden
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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.
Photo: Txllxt TxllxT (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Dubrovnik
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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 ring...
Haarlem
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De Bolwerken is Haarlem's older green ring, laid out from 1828 by JD Zocher when the city's fortifications came down and needed a public use, decades before his son helped design Kenaupark a couple...
Split
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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.
Granada
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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 Univ...
Lucca
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Lightning took this tree down after the war and it came back as three.
Verona
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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...
Photo: Garonzi Stefania (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Kamakura
At about four in the morning on 10 March 2010, in a gale, it came out of the ground.
Cordoba
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Every other tree in this garden has living relatives.
Ferrara
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The first written record of this tree dates to 1890, and it did not start out in a library garden.
Photo: Nicola Quirico (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Autumn colour
Parco Massari's plant list runs long, planes, paulownias, horse chestnuts, magnolias, birches, limes, firs, pines, acacias, but the ginkgo is the one tree in it whose lineage predates the flowering...
Photo: Nicola Quirico (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Harderwijk
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The man this ginkgo is credited to is the man who gave the species its name, thirty-six years later.
Kagoshima
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Kagoshima's preservation register holds two trees at Nanshu Shrine, and the ginkgo is the taller by ten metres.
Miyazaki
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The Satsuma lords passed this tree on their way to Edo.
Nara
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Before you reach Kasuga Taisha itself, the approach path stops at a small purification shrine, Haraedo, where visitors were traditionally meant to be cleansed before going on to the main sanctuary.
Takachiho
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Japan made this ginkgo a national natural monument in June 1951, and the measurements explain why: 9.20 metres round at chest height and 36.4 metres tall, which is a very large ginkgo by any standard.
Arita
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In September 2020 the house next door moved twenty metres down the road, because a 2018 arborist survey found this ginkgo dropping branches large enough to worry about.
Photo: STA3816 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Bordeaux
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The French name for a ginkgo is the forty crown tree, after an 18th-century collector in Montpellier said to have paid forty ecus for a single sapling when the species had just reached Europe from...
Como
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This ginkgo and the cedar a short walk away were almost certainly planted by the same person in the same decade.
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This ginkgo is male, which in this species is a decision rather than an accident.
Daruvar
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Croatia's biggest ginkgo has a partner.
Dengfeng
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The holes in this ginkgo's trunk are put down locally to monks driving a finger into the wood, the one-finger and two-finger Chan training Shaolin built its name on.
Frankfurt
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In September 1815 Goethe wrote a poem about a single ginkgo leaf, split down the middle and still one leaf, and sent it to Marianne von Willemer with two real ginkgo leaves fixed to the page.
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Frankfurt's famous ginkgo is the one in Rödelheim that may have given Goethe two leaves for a poem.
Freiburg
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The car park is gone and the ginkgo is protected.
Ghent
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Flanders' heritage inventory still files this tree under its old Dutch name, Japanse notenboom, the Japanese nut tree, which gets it wrong twice.
Photo: Geert Van der Linden (CC BY 4.0)
Heerlen
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This ginkgo grows along the drive to Kasteel Terworm, in good health as of a 2026 survey, standing where anyone walking up to the castle's front door can see it.
Higashi-Hiroshima
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The fire took the buildings.
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The national giant-tree survey found this ginkgo in 2000, measured its trunk at 3.16 metres round, and recorded it in good health.
Himi
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Most autumns this ginkgo drops around 180 litres of nuts.
Photo: 藤谷良秀 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ichinohe
In fruit
Ginkgos are either male or female.
Kitakata
Autumn colour
Forty-four pillars hold up the Nagatoko and it has no walls at all.
Lausanne
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Every other species in the ginkgo's order is a fossil.
Luxembourg City
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Between two measurements this ginkgo got most of a metre thicker and most of a metre shorter.
Photo: GilPe (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Madeira
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Madeira's official register of monumental trees records this ginkgo for exactly one reason, size, and where the age should go it says sem referencia, no reference.
Nagi
As a boy, the story goes, Honen used a ginkgo branch as a walking stick on his climb up Mount Nagi to study at Bodaiji temple.
Oguni
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From the road it reads as a small wood of ginkgos.
Photo: STA3816 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Pisa
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This is reckoned to be the first ginkgo ever planted in Tuscany.
Pittsburgh
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Pittsburgh's champion ginkgo grows just below a children's playground in Highland Park.
Strasbourg
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Two ginkgos face each other across Place de la Republique, each more than 470 centimetres around, and Strasbourg tells a story about how they arrived, as a gift from the emperor of Japan to the Ger...
Photo: Daniel Cahen (CC BY)
Stuttgart
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Two male ginkgos stand side by side at the Wilhelma's Palmenhaus, and the eastern one is the fourth-largest of its kind in Baden-Württemberg.
Takayama
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When this ginkgo drops its last leaf, Hida expects its first snow the next day.
Photo: KimonBerlin (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Toul
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An admiral is said to have brought this tree home in his luggage.
Photo: Utilisateur:Djampa (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Yangpyeong
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A king is said to have given this tree a court rank.
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