'Thousands of Heavy, Golden, Fan-Shaped Leaves'

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.”

The phenomenon adds to the tree’s allure. It doesn’t look or behave like anything else. Sacks writes: “Whenever it is, each tree will have its own Night of the Ginkgo. Few people will see this—most of us will be asleep—but in the morning the ground beneath the ginkgo will be carpeted with thousands of heavy, golden, fan-shaped leaves.”