{"id":11586,"date":"2025-09-23T18:33:50","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T22:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-humanity-saved-the-ginkgo-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T18:33:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T22:33:50","slug":"how-humanity-saved-the-ginkgo-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/how-humanity-saved-the-ginkgo-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Pressed between the pages of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> \u2014 a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library \u2014 is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the White Rabbit gazing anxiously at his pocket watch. <\/p>\n

I still remember the afternoon I picked it up from under the four majestic ginkgo trees standing sentinel at the northern entrance of Varna\u2019s Sea Garden \u2014 the iconic park perched on the cliffs of the Black Sea in my father\u2019s hometown, where my grandparents took me each summer; I still remember the shock of seeing something so strange and beautiful, so unlike my notion of a leaf, and then the gasp of revelation: I suddenly realized that anything \u2014 a leaf, a life \u2014 can take myriad shapes beyond the standard template, can bend and broaden the Platonic ideal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Triumph of Life<\/em>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The improbable presence of four ancient trees native to Asia in Communist Bulgaria is a microcosm of the story of the ginkgo itself.<\/p>\n

Earth\u2019s oldest surviving tree genus, ginkgos were there before the dinosaurs existed, before Africa and South America parted. But after a long epoch of triumph over droughts and floods and mass extinctions, they came teetering on the brink of extinction for reasons entombed in mystery. <\/p>\n

Jared Farmer chronicles their evolutionary trajectory in his altogether fascinating book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

These ginkgophytes were, in their evolutionary heyday, the foremost innovators of the plant kingdom. They could shed leaves in winter, go dormant in low-light seasons, switch between stub growth and branch growth depending on conditions, and resprout from lignotubers \u2014 energy-storing roots \u2014 after disturbances. On a prior planet with relatively few tall plants and no fast-growing angiosperms, ginkgophytes achieved dominance as generalists. <\/p>\n

As Darwin said, \u201crarity precedes extinction,\u201d but the duration of rarity varies greatly. Ginkgo<\/em> is a temporal outlier. Ginkgophytes survived multiple mass extinction events and outlived their original seed dispersers, which might have been carrion-eating animals attracted by the sweet-rotten smell of the fleshy seedcoats. After a long period of glory in the Mesozoic era, ginkgophytes declined in the Cenozoic and dwindled to one species by the ice ages. Ginkgoes disappeared from North America, then Europe, and finally Japan, becoming, by the Pleistocene epoch, mountain refugees in China.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Long-eared owl in ginkgo by Japanese artist Ohara Koson, c. 1900-1930. (Available as a print<\/a> and a stationery card<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It was there that itinerant Buddhist monks discovered them. Taken both by the trees\u2019 medicinal properties, which had become a staple of Chinese medicine, and by their uncommon beauty, the monks began landscaping Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over Japan with ginkgos. <\/p>\n

In 1683, the polymathic German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer set out for Japan under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company. He spent a decade there, then another decade writing the first Western study of Japan\u2019s history, culture, and flora, which included the first botanical description of this singular tree he had encountered in Nagasaki. He gave it the awkward name Ginkgo<\/em>, likely in error, as the original Japanese name should have been transliterated as ginkio<\/em>, ginkjo<\/em>, or ginkyo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ginkgo by Engelbert Kaempfer, 1712. (Available as a print<\/a> and a stationery card<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The printed word, like the Internet that succeeded it, is a copying machine for error. The spelling spread across botany until Linnaeus himself adopted it in his taxonomical Bible, relegating Ginkgo biloba<\/em> \u2014 which he had never seen or studied himself \u2014 to the appendix of \u201cobscure plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the ginkgo captivated the Western imagination with its striking geometry and its dramatic dance with chlorophyll<\/a>, casting its spell on masses and monarchs alike. <\/p>\n

Among the enchanted was the Duke of Weimer. <\/p>\n

When Goethe \u2014 the Duke\u2019s personal adviser \u2014 encountered the ginkgo at the royal gardens in 1815, it lit him up with a metaphor for the nature of love and the nature of the self, which he rendered in a poem penned in a letter to a friend he may or may not have been in love with, signed with a pressed ginkgo leaf. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Goethe\u2019s manuscript<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

GINKGO BILOBA<\/strong>
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<\/em><\/p>\n

In my garden\u2019s care and favor
From the East this tree\u2019s leaf shows
Secret sense for us to savor
And uplifts the one who knows.<\/p>\n

Is it but one being single
Which as same itself divides?
Are there two which choose to mingle
So that each as one now hides?<\/p>\n

As the answer to such question
I have found a sense that\u2019s true:
Is it not my songs\u2019 suggestion
That I\u2019m one and also two?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Goethe was by then Europe\u2019s most eminent poet, his verses the era\u2019s equivalent of viral. Just as he had popularized the cloud names we use today<\/a>, his poem contributed to the ginkgo craze that overtook Europe, then spread to America. Soon, horticulturalists and urban planners all over the Western hemisphere were saturating botanical gardens and city parks with ginkgos. Among them was Anton Novak \u2014 the Czech visionary who spent forty-two years dreaming up Bulgaria\u2019s Sea Garden and building it into the most admired urban wilderness of the Balkans, so that a six-year-old girl can pick up a ginkgo leaf a century later and have a revelation that lasts a lifetime. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, geology was in its heyday and evolutionary theory was taking root. Scientists were unearthing ginkgo fossils hundreds of millions of years old, beginning to wonder how the first land plants evolved, beginning to suspect the ancient trees might hold a key to the enigma. <\/p>\n

In 1894, Japanese botanist Sakugor\u014d Hirase set out to study the reproduction of ginkgos, which are not \u201cperfect flowers\u201d<\/a> and therefore produce male and female gametes on separate trees. Under a microscope, Hirase discovered the ginkgo spermatozoid and, with surprise, watched it arrive at the ovum by swimming through the fluid \u2014 motility inherited from the marine past of plants, establishing the ginkgo as a primordial species, the missing link between ferns and conifers, and a living fossil, like the dawn redwood<\/a>, reaching across deep time to bridge our stratum of being with that of the dinosaurs. <\/p>\n

Today, ginkgos line the streets of countless cities and rustle in parks all over the world. The oldest survivors in the wild have witnessed the births of major religions and the deaths of massive civilizations. Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Openheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Two pigeons with falling ginkgo leaves by Japanese artist Ohara Koson, c. 1900-1930. (Available as a print<\/a> and a stationery card<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation. \u201cFearlessness is what love seeks,\u201d<\/em> Hannah Arendt wrote in balancing the equation between love and loss<\/a>. \u201cSuch fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future\u2026 Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.\u201d<\/em> Nearly two centuries after Goethe, poet Howard Nemerov lenses this elemental unit of aliveness through the ginkgos:<\/p>\n

\n

THE CONSENT<\/strong>
by Howard Nemerov<\/em><\/p>\n

Late in November, on a single night
Not even near to freezing, the ginkgo trees
That stand along the walk drop all their leaves
In one consent, and neither to rain nor to wind
But as though to time alone: the golden and green
Leaves litter the lawn today, that yesterday
Had spread aloft their fluttering fans of light.<\/p>\n

What signal from the stars? What senses took it in?
What in those wooden motives so decided
To strike their leaves, to down their leaves,
Rebellion or surrender? and if this
Can happen thus, what race shall be exempt?
What use to learn the lessons taught by time,
If a star at any time may tell us: Now.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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