In the first autumn after we moved from San Francisco to Berkeley, I would regularly walk from my house to the university campus in the mornings. Every time I made this journey, at about the halfway point, I’d find myself in a state of high dudgeon. This agitation invariably struck just before I reached Shattuck Avenue. The world grew unpardonable. Whatever I happened to be thinking about—some argument with a critic online, some puzzle in my writing, some exchange with Josephine—would turn over in my brain until it itched with offensive implications. The warmth of the sun, the crispness of the air, the students cycling past, all were loaded with insult. I was like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, suddenly livid for no apparent reason.
Then I would cross Shattuck and my world would steady on its axis. I’d notice that I was walking on a typically beautiful fall day, on a street lined with gold-leaved trees. I’d remember how grateful I am to have work and a family that I love.
I wasn’t fully conscious of this bizarre mood swing at first. But one day, I set out on my walk with the suspicion that there was something about that particular block that set me awry. This time, it was about as subtle as an air horn braying at my head. After I crossed the street, this silent air horn disappeared as quickly as it had started up. It was like I received a powerful mood-altering injection that wore off after precisely one block—and always the same block. I stopped and walked back. Why was I so annoyed? It was only then that I became aware of the stench. Occasional breaths of rot, wisps of vomit, wafted delicately in the breeze.
Smell is the most subliminal of the senses. Volatile chemicals can slip into our sensory receptors and work powerful magic on our emotions, without alerting us to their presence. It may be different for sommeliers, but I suspect that the Proustian effect of smell on emotion is related to the fact that scents act below the level of consciousness.
I looked up and immediately guessed the source. Those beautiful gold leaves clung to the limbs of ginkgo trees, and their seeds were underfoot. They were each about an inch in diameter and covered in desiccating flesh, like greasy yellow dates. They were putrefying with fury.
I’d only recently learned that ginkgos produce stinky seeds, but had assumed that the friend who mentioned their smell was just supremely sensitive. I’d never noticed that the trees smelled bad, and I’d never seen the seeds.
Most trees are hermaphrodites. Each oak tree, for instance, produces both acorns (female) and pollen-spreading catkins (male). Each pine makes both pinecones and pollen cones. But ginkgos have distinct males and females. Because ginkgo seeds smell so bad, people often plant only the males. This is true for other trees as well: Yews, ash, holly, junipers, poplars, and willows all come in male and female varieties. Landscapers and city arborists often favor the males so there will be less fruit and other reproductive equipment falling from the branches. But by choosing males, we are also opting for pollen. A big male ginkgo can throw a trillion rugby-ball-shaped grains of pollen into the air every spring.
This trade-off between spring pollen and autumn stench made me wonder: What are we doing planting ginkgos in the first place? Why populate our cities with these particular trees? And, on the other side, what were ginkgos “thinking” when they evolved to produce such offensive fruit? Clearly they weren’t considering human sensibilities. But who, then, is the ginkgo seed designed to titillate?
Is there any leaf as strange as the Ginkgo biloba? Most tree leaves are built around a main backbone running up the middle with ribs branching off to each side. The structure of ginkgo’s dual-lobed fan (the source of the name “biloba”) is strangely simple: The veins run from the edge of the leaf all the way down its stem. Sometimes they divide in two, but they never resemble the normal branching networks. If we were built the same way, a capillary in your little finger would run directly back to your heart rather than connecting to a nearby artery. In fact, the ginkgo’s leaf design is unique among seed-bearing plants.
Some hundred million years ago, leaves like this shaded dinosaurs on every continent. The ginkgo trees that grow in our towns are virtually identical to the ginkgos that began to appear two hundred million years ago. The golden age of the ginkgo family, Ginkgophyta (technically a whole division of plant life), was the Cretaceous, which lasted from 140 million to 80 million years ago.
Evolutionarily, Ginkgophytes are between ferns and modern flowering plants. The pollen of almost every other plant is passive: It floats around, and if any grain ends up in just the right place, in just the right flower, it can deliver its payload of genes. Ginkgo pollen, by contrast, is active: Once it lands on a female plant’s seed cone, it opens up and releases sperm that swim using their thousands of filaments arranged in spirals. I find it astounding that something so stationary (a tree!) can produce a mobile creature that rides the wind out into the world and then scrambles to the finish line to spread its DNA. Imagine if evolution had scaled this up and trees made little walking body parts to carry and bury their seeds.
Ginkgophytes thrived in a warmer, wetter time, when the poles were temperate regions and now-extinct monsters browsed among the trees. As botanist Peter Crane puts it in his book Ginkgo, “Several different kinds of ginkgolike trees watched as our ancestors transformed from reptiles to mammals.” Perhaps those scuttling ancestors chewed ginkgo fruits. Something must have given the ginkgo a reason to produce those awful smells—some Cretaceous scavenger sniffing for decaying flesh.
The Ginkgophytes couldn’t keep up with the changing planet. The world transformed dramatically sixty-five million years ago, when an asteroid slammed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula. The debris it threw into the atmosphere blocked the sun, making Earth colder. The dinosaurs died, and so did many relatives of the ginkgo. The Oligocene was rough for ginkgos too, and they disappeared from the poles. In the Miocene, they abandoned North America, and then died out in Europe during the Pliocene. Finally, after every one of the tree’s relatives died off, only a few protected valleys in China harbored ginkgos. If we were similarly orphaned, it would mean that the planet would have lost all the creatures in which we see some flicker of commonality: all apes and monkeys, all dogs and whales and bears, all the rest of the mammals, all frogs and lizards and birds—all the creatures having a central nerve cord like our spinal cord, including many invertebrates, like sea squirts. Our closest remaining relatives would be things like starfish. If you can imagine a world in which we were the sole living representative of the phylum Chordata, then you can understand the isolation of the ginkgo.
It’s tough for anachronisms like this to survive, because the symbiotic alliances they’ve made (such as the one oaks have made with squirrels) fall apart as their friends go extinct. But ginkgos managed to find a new friend: humans. The trees probably would have died off if people hadn’t taken a liking to them. People have been nurturing ginkgos for at least two thousand years.
Humans carried the ginkgo out into the world, reversing its retreat. In 1730, Dutch merchants brought a ginkgo from Japan to the Botanic Garden in Utrecht, Holland. People were eager to plant this unusual tree. From there, the species traveled to England, and then, in 1784, to Philadelphia.
It seemed there was no place for the Ginkophytes as the age of dinosaurs became the age of mammals. But now, oddly, ginkgos find themselves uniquely suited to the age of humans. They are resistant to pollution and disease, and are famously resilient in the face of urban abuses (a ginkgo less then a kilometer from ground zero survived the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, though the shrine behind it was flattened). They prosper in the sticky heat of New Orleans and the cold winters of Montreal. They prefer good soil, but can grow well in a square of dirt between concrete slabs. They thrive in partial shade, which is what you get in the presence of tall buildings. By clinging to life for millions of years, these trees have landed in an era offering a new ecological niche—the city—for which they are perfectly adapted.
The most compelling hypothesis I’ve seen to explain the decline of the Ginkgophytes is that the trees lost their seed distributors.
Many plants rely on partners of other species to help them reproduce: Darwin’s orchid, for example, cannot complete the sex act without the cooperation of Morgan’s sphinx moth and its twelve-inch-long tongue, which is precisely adapted to the shape of the flower. If one dies out, so will the other. Seed distributors are not quite so vital, and ginkgos can still reproduce quite well on their own. But without assistance, the trees only spread to new areas slowly. Each generation can travel only as far as a nut can roll. It takes thirty years for a ginkgo to reach sexual maturity and produce its first seed. So, about a foot per decade—far too slow to outrun glaciers. Plants often solve this problem by recruiting animals to carry their seeds.
Surely those pungent seeds evolved for a reason, besides annoying me. Ginkgos likely coated their seeds with stinking flesh to appeal to the sorts of creatures that love vile, stinking things. Perhaps it was a dinosaur or an ancient mammal that gravitated toward the smell of rotting meat. When this mystery creature ate the seeds, it would have absorbed the fruity exterior as it passed through its digestive system, but it would have deposited the seed itself, along with a small pile of fertilizing manure, in a new location. Ginkgo seeds sprout more readily if the fruit around them is removed.
This hypothesis is buttressed by the fact that several modern creatures eat the nuts. Botanist Peter Del Tredici, while on China’s Tianmu Mountain conducting research for his doctoral thesis on ginkgos, saw red squirrels and palm civets carrying off the seeds. Leopard cats in China eat them, and in Japan, raccoon dogs and badgers find them alluring. Here in the United States, people have seen their dogs eat them (and, more frequently, roll in them). Eastern gray squirrels eat ginkgo nuts and I have seen a fox squirrel poking around a cluster of hanging ginkgo fruits.
That squirrel may have already eaten some of the seeds, but I didn’t see it pluck any of them. Instead, it walked out along a spindly branch that rested on the bough of a neighboring pine—at least until the squirrel weighed it down and it gave way, sending the rodent tumbling. Just as quickly, the squirrel caught a branch with a rear paw and swung like that for a moment, not showing the slightest hint of alarm.
If the squirrel wasn’t going to claim the fruit, I decided, I would. I picked one of the seeds and took it home.
The fruit was still green. The skin was frosted with white powder, like a Turkish delight. Beneath this was plump flesh, delicately mottled. The stem connected in a lopsided lump, like haphazardly melted wax. It didn’t smell at all. I left it on my desk.
One morning when I was nursing a cup of coffee at my desk, attempting to catch up with the Internet, I noticed that I was grinding my teeth. Wait, I thought, and I sniffed.
After a week, the ginkgo fruit had turned yellow, and started to collapse inward. I leaned close and inhaled, then jerked spasmodically backward. The smell was unmistakable. And though I’d thought it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I had remembered, it was just as pungent. You know that moment in a horror movie when the protagonist opens a box and finds her best friend’s corpse, along with the worms that have been eating him? The seed was the friend. I was the protagonist.
Surely this perfume is made up of many subtle parts, but the main olfactory chemical released by the seeds is butyric acid, which is also present in rancid butter and vomit. There is also hexanoic acid, which has a fatty, waxy, barnyard kind of smell. But the combination of these two acids’ smells is not enough to describe the ginkgo fruit’s stench. It’s both of those things, plus a spritz of essential oils concentrated from a stout case of trench foot. An eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, Carl Peter Thunberg, claimed that the Japanese ate the fleshy seed coat. I do not believe it.
I really had to get up close to smell it. This little fruit wasn’t stinking up my whole office, it was just squeezing out the occasional jet of volatile chemicals. By the time these chemicals reached my nose, about two feet away, they were diffuse enough to affect my liminal perception without triggering a conscious response—at least for a little bit. I picked it up gingerly and carried it outside.
When people do eat ginkgo seeds, they remove the stinking flesh and roast the interior nuts. After a few more weeks, I resolved to try this. The juices in the fruits contain chemicals closely related to those in poison oak and ivy, so I put on blue latex gloves. Josephine also wanted to wear gloves, though they were far too big and fell off whenever she let her hands drop below her waist. When a food is forbidden to or declared inappropriate for her, like coffee, she insists that she loves it. But her reaction to the ginkgo seed was visceral: She wrinkled her nose, squinched her eyes, and pulled away with undeniable disgust.
In traditional production, I’d learned, people often bury the nuts until the fruit has rotted away and then dig them up again. A faster method involves immersing the seeds in water (to suppress the smell) and squeezing off the flesh by hand. I took a small bowl of water to the backyard and dropped my ginkgo seed inside. Josephine squatted beside me, intent. Most of the flesh came off with the first squeeze, and the rest was easy to rub away. The seed was a smooth tan oval, flaring to form a sharp edge along its longer circumference. I dumped the water on our flowerbed, tossed the flesh on the compost pile, and took the seed inside for one more wash under the faucet. It still smelled terrible. Josephine turned it over and over, then held it to her chest and did a little dance.
I poured cooking oil into a cast-iron pan and Josephine plopped in the seed. We cooked it over a high flame until the oil started to smoke and the seed turned brown, then I flipped it over, turned the burner down low, and covered the pan.
I’d read that it’s important to cook the seeds to denature their toxins. Ginkgotoxin is similar in structure to vitamin B6, and eating too much of it interferes with our ability to synthesize the vitamin. That can provoke a biochemical cascade that, especially in children, may lead to seizures, and even death. This sounds alarming, but it wasn’t enough to deter me. Before I started researching plant chemistry, I divided the world of potential foods into two categories: things that are poisonous and things that aren’t. But in reality everything is a little bit poisonous. It’s the dose that matters, not the poison. All plants defend themselves with toxins, but usually at such low levels that they are harmless, and might even be good for us. There is a hypothesis that our immune system has evolved to rely on a continual barrage of plant chemicals to fine-tune its production of antioxidants. In other words, the very thing that makes vegetables healthy may be the fact that they are trying to kill us.
Ginkgo seeds, however, seemed more dangerous than, say, broccoli. But cooking is an effective way of breaking down the chemicals that plants construct (this can be a good or a bad thing, depending). To err on the side of caution, I let the seed cook in the pan for about fifteen minutes after turning down the flame. My hands were haunted by phantom itches while we waited. The power of suggestion was playing tricks on me, and though I’d been careful, some paranoid corner of my mind was convinced my fingers were about to break out into an itchy rash. Then, without thinking, I would rub my eyes and become intently aware of a prickling sensation around my eyelids.
When I finally took out the ginkgo seed, it was blackened on both sides, and I could feel the nut rattling around inside the thin shell. It shattered under a little pressure from a nutcracker. Something small, brown, and misshapen fell onto the table and immediately broke into several pieces. It looked like something that had melted and then solidified, and perhaps it had. Josephine snatched a flake.
“It’s yummy!” she exclaimed.
I did not share her enthusiasm. The shard I crunched between my teeth was hard and tasteless, more like a shell than a nut. I picked up a mild burned odor and nothing else.
Beth’s palate is several times more sensitive than mine, and she gingerly took the piece that Josephine offered and turned it over in her mouth.
“Oh yeah, it is pleasant,” she allowed. “There is a sort of nuttiness.”
Most of my piece had gotten stuck to my molars, and as it softened it became sweet and emitted a mild, toasty, butterscotch-like flavor. I must have cooked it so long that I’d not only denatured the toxins, but also caramelized the sugars in the seed. I’d have to try again, maybe with some instruction this time.
Josephine took another small piece. “Mmm,” she said with drama. “I super love it.”
In his book on the ginkgo, Peter Crane includes a list of the flavor descriptions he came across:
“With a plump, soft, partly creamy, partly waxy white ‘meat’ not much bigger than a peanut, the ginkgo nut has a taste that has been variously described as like ‘mild Swiss cheese,’ ‘pine nuts,’ ‘potatoes crossed with sweet chestnuts,’ ‘green pea crossed with Limburger cheese,’ or just ‘fishy.’” Ginkgo nuts are sold in Chinatowns around the world as bai guo, often inauspiciously translated as “semen ginkgo.”
Yum? Crane writes that he has encountered ginkgo nuts most often baked in their shells on a tray, or in tinfoil. But they show up in both sweet and savory dishes—soups, stir-fries, desserts—in many different Asian culinary settings. In Japan the tradition of eating ginkgo nuts with sake goes back to at least 1758, when it was mentioned in the Kaiseki-ryori-cho, a book on traditional foods.
In the West you are more likely to hear about ginkgo as a medicine than as a food. In the popular imagination, it improves memory, prevents Alzheimer’s disease, and cures erectile dysfunction. But there’s good evidence only that it keeps blood vessels from constricting, perhaps aiding people who have insufficient blood flow in the brain. That is a common cause of dementia, so some doctors have suggested giving it to certain elderly patients.
Ginkgo supplement pills are derived from the green leaves from trees on plantations. The owners of these plantations keep the trees stubby to ease harvesting. Supplement makers claim that ginkgo has been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. That’s true, but Chinese medicine employed the ginkgo nut, not the leaves. They used the seeds to prevent—among other things—drunkenness and hangovers. There’s little evidence it works. Doctors are still wary of ginkgo because the chemical dose in each pill varies widely from one extract to the next, with no standardization and little regulation.
After I overcooked my ginkgo seed I was determined to find someone who could show me how they were supposed to taste. Josephine and I returned to the trees and filled a bag with seeds, which by this time were spotting the sidewalk. I cleaned them and then took them to Carolyn Phillips’s house, near San Jose. Phillips, a friend of a friend, had lived in Taiwan for eight years in the 1970s, and returned to the United States with a passion for Chinese food.
Phillips met me at the door, offered me slippers to replace my shoes, and ushered me into a house filled with Eastern art. She had short blond hair and a gaze so avidly focused that I found myself unconsciously matching her intensity, breathlessly peppering her with questions, even before we had perched on the couch.
Her husband, J. H. Huang, was as gentle as she was acute. He ghosted in, accepted introductions with a smile, expressed regret that I hadn’t been able to bring Josephine, then nodded to excuse himself and returned to his study, where he was reading Lao Tzu.
I’d wanted to find someone who understood the culinary tradition behind the cooking of ginkgo nuts because all the recipes I’d found in English were written by Westerners experimenting rather than drawing on East Asian history and practice. Phillips was well positioned to serve as a translator of culinary tradition: When she arrived in Taipei she found herself in the nexus of Chinese food cultures. When the Communists took over mainland China, many of the wealthy nationalists moved to Taiwan, she told me, and they brought with them cooks representing every regional tradition. “You have all the foods of China in one spot, all the most amazing foods. There were these incredible dining palaces. I just fell face-first into the cuisine.” She became a student of Chinese foods and recently poured everything she had learned into a cookbook: All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China.
As it turned out, there wasn’t much to cooking ginkgo, but Phillips had also prepared a small feast so I could try the seeds in the proper context. She had used store-bought, precleaned seeds, but when I produced mine she rolled them in a hot wok, toasting them like popcorn. The meat that emerged when we cracked them was bright green—like jade, she said—utterly different from the shriveled brown product of my overcooking. The seeds were, to my surprise, nearly tasteless, and a bit tacky. It was like eating stiff gnocchi. After all I’d read about the flavor of ginkgo, I’d expected them to be exciting and difficult, but they were mild and starchy, with just the faintest hint of bitterness. They were bitter in the way some beers are, pricking the taste buds just enough to make me take notice.
It’s not all about flavor, Phillips told me. Chinese culinary theory seeks to balance taste, texture, and color. For instance, Phillips had made a stir-fry that emphasized textures, with water chestnuts (very crunchy), cooked celery (somewhat crunchy), ginkgo (gummy), and red goji berries (soft). The flavor was delicious, but the contrasting textures, now that I knew to pay attention to them, were even more interesting. She had also made ginkgo braised with Napa cabbage, which brought out a bit of bitterness in the seeds.
Ginkgo shows up all over China, Phillips said, though it’s not a common ingredient. The seeds are valued for their putative medicinal properties, which is an underlying theme in Chinese culinary theory. The cooks think about the health qualities traditional Chinese medicine ascribes to each ingredient.
Huang joined us for lunch, and the pair told stories from Taiwan and from the hidden subcultures of Oakland’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. I gorged on the ginkgo dishes, along with soba noodles and smoked chicken. Partway through the meal I realized I’d easily eaten at least ten seeds, and asked if they thought I was in any danger. Phillips blinked. “I have never heard that they could cause poisoning,” she said. I wasn’t too concerned, because I had asked another cook, a woman born in China, about toxicity and she laughed. “Americans always say it’s poison,” she said. “No. This is American superstition.” On my own, I’d been hypervigilant, but there, eating good food with thousands of years of tradition behind it, I felt no concern.
What is it that makes ginkgos compelling? Peter Crane wrote: “Ginkgo owes its resurgence in historical times not just to its utilitarian value but also to some kind of irresistible biological charisma that has taken hold in both Eastern and Western cultures.” But what is this “irresistible biological charisma”? Ginkgo is not one of those superlative organisms, like the giant sequoia, or the blue whale, that is breathtaking because it’s shockingly out of scale with everything else we encounter. It doesn’t have brilliant colors or exhibit particularly startling behavior, although ginkgo sex is strangely wonderful. And yet people do form special relationships with these trees.
It must have something to do with their uniqueness. Ginkgos are different from the other species in this book in that they are strange enough that they sometimes draw attention to themselves. And once your eyes are tuned to see ginkgos, they pop out at you. After noticing those smelly trees, I began to see others: My nearest BART station is decorated with ginkgos, and there are several leggy youngsters within a block of my house. The writer Nancy Ross Hugo says that immature ginkgos are like “adolescent boys who don’t know where to put their fast-growing arms and legs.” It’s true: During the period when the trunk is about the circumference of an arm, ginkgos are in a hurry to grow all at once. “The widely spaced branches create a scaffolding that looks more like a coatrack than a tree,” Hugo wrote. But then, perhaps around the age of thirty or so, when the trunk’s circumference is closer to that of a thigh, leaves fill in this scaffold. While other trees turn many colors in the autumn, ginkgo leaves morph from green to gold. They begin to turn in late summer, and by about mid-November—depending on the latitude and the whims of the particular tree—they have transformed entirely. The trees are brilliantly uniform, each one a thick daub of yellow against the sky.
Perhaps it’s this autumn beauty that inclines people toward ginkgos. When they grow older still, they become giants of great gravitas. In comparison to those massive craggy branches, the leaves are dots. You can see through their pointillist drapery to the interior architecture. They live for many hundreds of years. Careful reviews of historical records puts the oldest trees at about a thousand years, though some claim they are as much as four thousand years old. These big ginkgos—there are more than one hundred of them—are especially magnificent in the autumn.
Then the leaves fall: One day the golden leaves are aloft, and the next they are spread in a circle around the trunk. The fall is so dramatic that for many years the townspeople of Monroe, Wisconsin, held a competition to see who could most accurately guess the date the old tree outside the library would shed its leaves. “Ginkgo has the most synchronized leaf drop of any tree I know,” Crane writes. I waited eagerly to note the day of my local leaf drop, but in the mild climate of coastal California it didn’t happen quite as suddenly as the experts had described. Perhaps some ginkgos lost leaves faster than other trees, but not dramatically so. Who could blame them? The seasons here pass quietly, like a pulse beneath the skin.
None of the ginkgo’s aesthetic qualities are all that different from those of other trees. I could just as easily wax poetic about the beauty of beech trees, or the majesty of ancient sugar pines. But I think that ginkgos are just unusual enough for the occasional human to take notice of them. It’s not that any particular tree or breed of dog or varietal of rose is objectively superior to its peers, they just happen to be the creatures that momentarily capture our flickering attention. As soon as humans take openhearted notice of anything in the natural world, we find reason to love it.
I came across one of those gawky juvenile trees on a sunny September afternoon. It was planted next to the same driveway where Josephine and I had pilfered acorns. It was small, shorter than I, and its leaves were turning yellow at their edges.
“Are you looking at that ginkgo tree?” someone called.
I looked for the speaker. Two women, one with white hair and one gray, were standing at the top of a slate-tiled stoop. They came down the steps.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” said the white-haired woman. “It wants to grow every which way but up, though.” She pointed to the top of the tree, which had broken off and was a lifeless stick. It had vigorous branches sprouting laterally.
I asked if she knew its sex.
“Well, it’s funny you should ask. A friend of mine said, ‘No matter what, don’t get a male, because they smell awful.’ But then I learned it’s the females that smell, we had it backwards.”
Nonetheless, this tree had never borne fruit, she said, so perhaps it was male after all. I explained that she wouldn’t know for a long time, because ginkgos take twenty or thirty years to become sexually mature.
“Ah well,” she smiled. “By then I would be a very old lady.” As we parted, she told me to let her know if I learned anything about how to guide her ginkgo’s growth upward rather than outward.
A few days later, I left a note for my neighbor on her stoop. I’d learned that ginkgos have two types of branches: fast-growing long shoots, and slow-and-steady short shoots, which produce leaves. Young ginkgos are almost entirely long shoots, which is why juveniles often look so leggy. If the uppermost long shoot dies, the nearest short shoots will transform to take over the job. This is true for all trees: When one loses the uppermost leader, a chemical signal will cue other branches to grow upward. Because ginkgos grow quickly and can sprout branches from any leaf shoot, they can be especially unruly. A gardener can restrain these upstarts by simply pruning off their tips, or by tying them to train the branches upward. An espaliered ginkgo covers a wall of the University of Cambridge plant sciences building like ivy: it is living proof they can be trained. But this is unusual and evidently takes a lot of work.
Paying attention to the minutiae of how a tree grows sounds like the most boring possible occupation. Watch paint dry, and at least it’s over in a few hours. Trees can grow for centuries. But Nancy Ross Hugo and Robert Llewellyn, the creators of the remarkable book Seeing Trees, found that they actually couldn’t keep up with the trees in their backyards. If you look at the big picture—the tree as it’s growing—nothing happens. If, however, you notice the details—the leaves emerging, the flowers forming, the fruits bursting from the flowers—then trees seethe with action.
To capture this combination of large and small, Llewellyn used software to merge multiple photographs. The resulting images allow you to see these tree parts more clearly than you can in real life. Both the large and the small perspectives remain in focus, producing startling images. What looks like a radiant deep-sea creature turns out to be the vermillion pollen-releasing structure of a common red maple.
Trees will reward the observant. Watch closely in springtime and you can see how buds push outward from the wood and unfold their leaves. You can find the pollen distributors and pollen-receiving flowers. You can watch the seeds grow and transform, and finally watch the leaves fall. Hugo says that if you are willing to notice trees, you’re likely to start thinking of fall as “a verb, not a noun. The action of leaves in air.” The same is surely true of spring: It’s not just a section of the calendar to be traversed, it’s the springing forth of delicate, fleshy leaves from inanimate wood.
You don’t have to climb to see this stuff. When a tree is too tall to see up into its branches, Hugo recommends looking down to see what has fallen. She tries not to call this material “litter.” “I consider it detritus laden with treasures, like shells on a seashore.”
A lot of these tree treasures are bizarre. Once you see one, you may wonder how you ever missed it. But you have to truly see it: Let it in, allow it to provoke your curiosity. We have a pair of magnolias in front of our house, and one day Josephine picked up a sort of cone from under these trees and asked me what it was. I said I didn’t know. I’d seen these things so often that I could ignore them without ever wondering what they were up to.
But when I looked at a magnolia cone closely, I couldn’t help but wonder. It looks like a Dr. Seuss character, with a fuzzy oblong head covered with stiff brown curls and a depilated neck. This cone, or follicetum, develops at the center of those big magnolia flowers. If it stays on the tree, it will grow much larger and produce red seeds. But sometimes, a squirrel or a crow dislodges a cone—or perhaps the tree aborts it—while it’s still in this half-developed state.
When you decide to learn about one species, you inevitably learn about others, and I’d been seeing references to magnolias in ginkgo books. Magnolias are not an evolutionary loner like ginkgos—most of its family survived—but it has been around almost as long. Both kinds of trees grew a hundred million years ago, and both likely fed dinosaurs.
Does it matter if something is a living fossil? The ginkgo is no more special than a relatively recent arrival like an oak, but it can open the doors of human perception a crack and provide a glimpse of eternity.
When the physician and writer Oliver Sacks was a boy, he had a book called Ancient Plants by the paleobotanist Marie Stopes. In Sack’s Island of the Colorblind, he wrote that Stopes’ book
excited me strangely. . . . I got my first glimpse of deep time, of the millions of years, the hundreds of millions, which separated the most ancient plants and our own. “The human mind,” Stopes wrote, “cannot comprehend the significance of vast numbers, of immense space, or of aeons of time”; but her book, illustrating the enormous range of plants which had once lived on the earth—the vast majority long extinct—gave me my first intimation of such eons. I would gaze at the book for hours, skipping over the flowering plants and going straight to the earliest ones—ginkgos, cycads, ferns, lycopods, horsetails.
There is something eerie and wonderful in these plants that have traversed the vastness of time, that have made their way from an alien world of the past into our own world. When Johannes Kepler confirmed the Copernican theory that Earth was not at the center of the universe, he confessed to feeling a “hidden and secret horror” at being lost in some obscure quadrant of the vastness. There’s an old ginkgo on the UC Berkeley campus that I visit sometimes, and when I lay my hands on its rough bark and try to imagine its journey across time and space, I can’t quite replicate Kepler’s horror, but sometimes, I do feel a twinge of vertigo to be standing so close to the edge of deep time. The probability—the number of coin flips for survival versus extinction—that led to me and this tree breathing the same air is mind-bogglingly low. It gives me an odd sense of camaraderie with the tree. It’s a raw, unsophisticated feeling, just: Will you look at us, alive! Together!
Sacks wrote lovingly about ginkgos, but he expressed this sense of camaraderie most clearly when writing about another living fossil, the cycad. Years after Sacks obsessed over Ancient Plants, he visited the cycads of Guam. He was surprised to find that a giant pollen cone of a cycad was warm to the touch; they generate heat, perhaps to spread insect-beckoning scents. Sacks, overcome by the “almost-animal warmth,” impulsively hugged it “and almost vanished in a huge cloud of pollen.”
I started this chapter by asking why people are inspired to plant Ginkgo biloba, but I suppose I was really asking, “What makes this tree special?” I’ve just filled pages with legitimate answers to that question. But at the same time, there’s nothing special about ginkgo. Every tree could provide just as many wonders if we dedicated the same amount of time to its study and appreciation.
As I learned about ginkgos, I also picked up facts about the other trees in my neighborhood. I learned that the often-hated tree of heaven has bark that smells of peanut butter when scratched. The magnolias in front of my house, of course, became fascinating when I thought of them as triceratops fodder. I noticed the horse chestnuts lining a nearby street when I saw the squirrels harvesting their nuts, and I learned that these nuts, or “conkers,” aren’t good for eating, but children around the world attach them to strings and see whose can last longest when they bash them against each other. Oh, and there was the pinecone I dissected with Josephine, which revealed a single seed. When she asked why it was attached to its gauzy wing, I threw it up into the air so she could see it helicopter down, but then watched as an eddy in the wind caught the propeller and whirled it up into the sky and out of sight. I learned that almost all city trees are floodplain species, with roots that can survive submerged, by water or concrete.
We plant trees, and then forget to notice them. They are ornaments, and they are also infrastructure, cleaning the air, absorbing storm water, and cooling the sidewalks. They can also provide food. I, for one, am happy to have a couple female ginkgos nearby. Perhaps I’ll begin gathering the seeds as an autumn tradition. But if nothing else, the stench forced me to pay attention, as I had as a child, to the meaning hidden in trees.