The Ginkgo of the Giardini Cavour

Sixty metres from the plane stands a tree with no living relatives. Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving species of an entire order of plants, closer to the conifers than to anything else with a broad leaf, and near identical leaves come out of rock two hundred million years old. This one is twenty-seven metres tall and three metres seventy round, planted with the rest of the garden in the 1870s. The register lists it for its particular vegetative architecture rather than its size, and standing under it shows why: the trunk goes up hard and straight, the limbs come off it in tiers, and the fan shaped leaves sit in flat sprays instead of a dome. Go in November. Ginkgo autumn is one of the few reliable spectacles in the plant world, because the leaves turn from green to a hard uniform yellow and then let go, very often most of them within a day or two, leaving a gold floor under a bare tree. Nobody records whether this one is male or female, so no promises about the fruit. Cities usually plant males, because the female drops a fleshy seed coat that smells strongly of rancid butter.