The Ginkgo of Schönbrunn

This is one tree with two sexes. Ginkgos are either male or female, never both, except this one: a female branch was grafted onto it at some point in its life, so a single male tree now also drops the messy, strong-smelling seeds normally produced only by female ginkgos. It arrived in Vienna in 1781, imported through an English nursery only a few decades after the species reached Europe at all, and it is very likely the oldest ginkgo now growing in Austria. It stands near the Wagenburg, the former imperial carriage house at Schönbrunn, on the Hietzinger Allee side of the park, its trunk grown to roughly five metres around and its crown to about twenty metres tall. Vienna listed it as a protected natural monument in 1939, one of the earliest ginkgos anywhere to receive that kind of formal status. It has outlived the empire that planted it and survived two world wars a few hundred metres from a palace that changed hands more than once, and each autumn it still does what ginkgos are famous for: every leaf on the tree turns gold and drops within days, all at once, rather than drifting down gradually like almost everything else in the park.