The Ginkgos of Place de la République

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: a gift from the emperor of Japan to the German Kaiser. Local reporting cannot say which Kaiser, Wilhelm I or Wilhelm II, and no document has ever been produced, so the gift belongs to the city's oral tradition rather than to its archives. The setting is not in doubt. The square was built as Kaiserplatz and finished in 1887, the ceremonial heart of the Neustadt, the new German quarter laid out after the annexation of Alsace in 1871. The trees went in between then and the early 1900s. They have stood through the return to France in 1918, the German annexation of 1940, the liberation of 1944, and the raising of the war memorial at the square's centre, a mother holding two dying sons, one in French uniform and one in German. In 2021 one of the pair reached the final of France's Arbre de l'Annee and did not win, which is also the most recent dated confirmation that both are alive and healthy. Nobody has counted their rings, so their age is inferred from the square around them. Ginkgo has a reputation for surviving whatever is thrown at it. It suits this square better than whoever planted them can have known.