I have a tree from the dinosaur age.
I kid you not. Standing proud in my front yard is a Gingko biloba tree, about 12 metres tall and just a wee tree for its kind.
The ginkgo is a living fossil, with an ancestry dating back 270 million years. Today, the species is only found in the wild in a remote region of China. Even there it may not be a native species, as there is evidence it may have been planted and preserved by Chinese monks over a period of 1,000 years. Both in China and abroad it is cultivated by gardeners like me, but it has never really become renaturalised in the environment.
I did not always know my tree was special, until a couple of years ago when one of my neighbours stopped to chat while I was mowing the lawn. He asked if I knew what kind of tree it was, which I did not, and he told me it was a ginkgo. Last month, when the Dundas Valley Tree Keepers launched their Heritage Tree Hunt, I decided to contact them. I am still waiting to hear if they think my tree is rare, or at least worthy of note.
The ginkgo is a sturdy sucker. It can grow quite tall – some specimens in China top 50 metres. They are also long lived. A ginkgo in Shanghai is four centuries old and a 3,000 year-old ginkgo was reported in Shandong province. There are also four ginkgos in Hiroshima, Japan that survived the 1945 atomic blast, in an area where most other living things were destroyed.
None of this would I have known if the Dundas Valley Tree Keepers had not challenged me to become more aware of the trees in my community. I hope my neighbours take note too. The urban forest holds lots of surprises if we only take the time to stop and look around.
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