Here are two truths: the ginkgo is immortal, and the ginkgo will die.
The ginkgo is a tree that escapes time — the oldest on record is 3,500 years old. Like all living organisms, ginkgos one day cease to live, but this will never be from old age. At the core of the ginkgo is the heartwood, but what grants them their longevity is actually just beneath the surface of the cork: the cambium, which holds together the inner rings of heartwood and sapwood. Scientists have learned that the cambium cells of the ginkgo don’t show signs of senescence — the gradual deterioration that is biological aging.* Enshelled by a resilient armor of tree bark and roots reaching deep into the ground, the ginkgo quietly protects its living cells, which in turn protect the ginkgo. So long as this layer of cells remains untouched, alive, they will continue to be a spring of lifetimes and stories, producing new phloem and xylem tissue. This is what makes them 被爆樹木 (hibakujumoku) — trees that survived bombs that split atoms, the darkest sides of humanity, and countless threats of extinction before the dawn of mankind. Even now, ginkgo trees are rare in the wild, reduced to remote mountains in eastern China. Yet they are a familiar face that lines city streets worldwide, conserved through millennia of cultivation. The ginkgo tree, with its glowing winged leaves, bearing gifts, bearing witness, bearing hope.
They bear many names too: the Maidenhair tree; Rökan, Tanakan and Tebonin extracts; living fossils; The Hermit; Ginkgo biloba. The western term for ginkgos comes from the Chinese 银杏 (Yínxìng) for silver apricot, translated into the kanji 銀杏 (Gin kyo) and then fatefully rechristened by a German explorer and Swedish botanist’s misspelling of the word in the 18th century. These many efforts lay bare the limitations of language to contain something as incommunicable and expansive as a tree.
꩜ The Ginkgo as a living fossil — like sea urchins, like horseshoe crabs, like tadpole shrimp. Ginkgos are almost biologically identical to their fossilized ancestors from the Middle Jurassic epoch, some 200 million years ago. On a human timeline, incomprehensible; a reminder of our brevity. Everywhere, they are dead and dying, but living on at the same time. More than simply living, they teem with aliveness. Resisting change and the order of things. Connecting life and afterlife.
꩜ The Ginkgo as The Hermit — ginkgos are the last of their kind. Ginkgo biloba is the only living species of the Ginkgo genus, which is the only remaining genus in the Ginkgoaceae family, which is the only existing family in the Ginkgoales order, an order that first appeared 290 million years ago, long before dinosaurs hatched on earth. Gentle elders, an omen of something ancient that defies extinction and evolution. The tree that cannot help but live.
I asked someone I crossed paths with recently for advice, and they instructed me to pay attention to what any ginkgo tree tells me. Tell me, tree, what do you believe in?
Trees communicate by exchanging complex chemical signals through thread-like fungi that connect their roots together. Though our understanding of it continues to be extremely limited, trees also experience the world through pheromones in the wind, and through the hums and vibrations of nearby creatures such as ourselves. Trees can even recognize whether they are surrounded by kin.† Can a tree be lonely? The last of their class, do ginkgos sing a different song? Gifted slowness, blurs of light, purity.
They stand transfixed in shifting landscapes — a living fossil in the anthropocene, which is to say a living memory. Are they at home here?
Timeless friend, who watched us unchanged and unmoving as we hummed into existence, and will one day watch us blip out of it. Does it want to remember, or would it choose to forget? What does a ginkgo offer to a world in flux, a people in everlasting transition? Us, so committed to our liminality, our living between myths. Them, blessed with endurance, revered for their patience. Like stories and like cambium cells, they grow around us, but also grow us.
*Wang, Li et al. "Multifeature Analyses of Vascular Cambial Cells Reveal Longevity Mechanisms in Old Ginkgo biloba Trees." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117, no. 4, 2020, pp. 2201-2210. <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1916548117>
†Biedrzycki, Meredith L., and Harsh P. Bais. "Kin Recognition in Plants: A Mysterious Behavior Unsolved." Journal of Experimental Botany, vol. 61, no. 15, October 2010, pp. 4123-4128. <https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erq250>.