The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden

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 already existed for six years by then. Ginkgo biloba had barely reached European gardens a generation earlier, brought from China as a curiosity that turned out to outlive nearly everything planted around it, and this tree has now stood through two centuries of a garden that itself survived the war that flattened most of the city around it. It shares its 1974 designation with two common beeches elsewhere in the garden, and one of those beeches was blown down by wind in 2020, according to a news report at the time. That loss does not touch this ginkgo, a separate tree under the same paperwork, but it is a reminder that a shared designation protects individuals, not a group's survival as a whole. No girth or height has been recorded for it in what is available so far, unusual for a tree this documented. It stands a few hundred metres from the Royal Oaks of Lazienki, close enough to fold into the same walk through central Warsaw's parks. The garden charges admission and closes its outdoor grounds over winter, opening again each March.