The Ginkgo of the Schubert Monument

Vienna's other great ginkgo does not get the attention Schönbrunn's does, despite standing a five minute walk from the cathedral. City councilman Heinrich Braun had it brought to Stadtpark and planted around 1900, decades after the species had become a fashionable import for European parks, and it now grows beside the marble statue of Franz Schubert unveiled here in 1872, close enough that photographs of one usually catch the edge of the other. Vienna declared it a protected natural monument on 3 July 1973, Naturdenkmal Nr. 569, on the grounds that a ginkgo this size is still a genuine rarity this far from its native range in China. Its own small plaque, bolted to the trunk, calls it by the old German name for the species: Fächerblätterbaum, the fan-leaf tree. Stadtpark itself was Vienna's first purpose-built public park, opened in 1862 along the Wien river specifically so the city's middle class would have somewhere to walk that was not a royal garden. The ginkgo has spent well over a century doing exactly that: watching Viennese office workers, tourists and dog walkers cross the park on their way to somewhere else, then turning, every autumn, the same uniform gold as its more famous cousin across town.