More than thirty
years ago the upstate New York newspaper where I worked as a reporter hired a
new editor in the features department. When she was being escorted around the
newsroom and introduced to the staff, I noticed she was wearing a necklace from
which hung a Ginkgo biloba leaf made
of gold. The appearance of ginkgo leaves is distinctive – fan-shaped and ridged
with veins. In the fall they turn buttery yellow. I
complimented her on the beauty of the necklace and we talked about trees. Her
degree was in biology, not journalism, which was soon confirmed as a good omen.
The ginkgo
has always been my favorite tree because of its intense beauty and age. Fossils
of ginkgo leaves dating from 270 million years ago have been found in China.
That’s the Permian Age, late in the Paleozoic, when the largest mass extinction
in Earth’s history occurred. The ginkgo, to use a term overused into
meaninglessness, is a survivor. In Schenectady, I lived a few blocks away from
Union College where a ninety-foot ginkgo more than 150 years old grows in Jackson’s Garden.
I’m reading the
late Oliver Sacks’ posthumously published collection of essays, Everything in Its Place (2019), which
includes “Night of the Ginkgo,” first published in The New Yorker in 2014. His title refers to what Sacks calls the
tree’s “synchronicity”: its leaves often fall in a single night:
“While the
leaves of the more modern angiosperms—maples, oaks, beeches, what have you—are
shed over a period of weeks after turning dry and brown, the ginkgo, a gymnosperm,
drops its leaves all at once.”
1 comment:
Remember John Shade's poem nestled in Nabokov's Pale Fire?
THE SACRED TREE
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
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