Detail of a watercolour of a red waterlily, painted in India by Mrs Fanny C. Russell between 1860 and 1870.
Is it invidious to privilege some plants more than others, because they fascinate, or astound, perhaps even repel? Yet there are plants that have inspired great wonderment, and even the hardened (and hardy) souls familiar with the world’s most biodiverse regions have been brought to a standstill by certain plants. Nature’s plant wonders are not merely sensory splendours. Scratch the surface, and their adaptations help reveal the history of life on Earth, in all its abundance and tenacity.
The peculiar upside-down or baobab trees bestride the thirsty regions of Africa, Madagascar and Australia. They serve as giant water towers and indigenous people literally tap the swollen trunk for its stored water. Welwitschias cope with their limited water supply in a range of ways, from their ever-growing leaves to a special kind of metabolism. Squat and low, welwitschias sit out the seasonal drought and sandstorms of their home in the Namib Desert. So far, they have managed to survive as a species from the age of the dinosaurs, when life was warmer and wetter.
If the welwitschia is renowned for it ugliness, few would dispute the loveliness of the giant waterlily native to the waterways of South America. While the pineapple-scented flowers attract the attention of pollinating beetles, the structure of the leaves – a masterclass in vegetable engineering – inspired the ironwork for London’s Crystal Palace, home to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Evolution has led to some near optimum configurations in the natural world. The special arrangement of the seeds in a sunflower head and the plant’s initial ability to track the sun both inspire solar-engineering projects.
Left The baobab tree’s curious pendant flower, in a watercolour perhaps drawn from the specimens growing in the Botanic Garden, Calcutta, around the turn of the 19th century.
Right Details of a Welwitschia mirabilis, including (bottom centre) the insertion of the leaves, as well as the cones, scales, flower parts and seeds that make up the reproductive structures of this amazing plant.
Pitcher plants and the giant rafflesia find the nutrients they need in singular ways. Pitchers grow in nitrogen-poor areas and compensate for this deficiency by catching insects (and sometimes larger prey) in their highly modified leaves. The pitcher holds a solution of acidic digestive enzymes. Must-have plants of the 19th-century hothouse, the exploitation in the wild reached dangerous levels. Rafflesias are the world’s largest single flowers. They are also parasites, living on the roots of tropical vines and attracting their pollinators, carrion flies, by emitting the smell of rotting meat. Loss of the host vine through habitat destruction in the forests will also mean that these exceptional plants will vanish.
Man-made habitat destruction doesn’t come much harsher than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the close of the Second World War. Less than a mile from the epicentre of the bomb a ginkgo tree rose like a phoenix from its burnt remains. Our relationship with the plant world is ancient, and plants do seemingly limitless things for us, but it is still a work in progress. Utility aside, a plant simply being there, part of the web of life, warrants a profound celebration.
Adansonia spp.
They carried me to a particular spot where I saw a herd of antelopes; but I laid aside all thoughts of sport, as soon as I perceived a tree of prodigious thickness, which drew my whole attention.
Michel Adanson, 1759
The flower and leaf of the baobab, with the fruit behind, from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (1828). The fruits were said to be traded by the Mandingo people of West Africa. Damaged fruit were burnt and the ash boiled with rancid palm oil to make soap. Dried leaves were mixed with food and used medicinally.
According to one African creation myth, God gave each animal its own tree. The hyena was the last to receive his and got the baobab. He was so disgusted that he threw the tree away and it landed upside down; the baobab’s distinctive shape does make its branches look like a root system. It has always been a botanical curiosity to outside observers, but it was the complete tree for those who lived in the areas of its unusual geographical distribution.
The genus Adansonia is named after the French naturalist Michel Adanson, who first encountered the baobab around 1750. But the tree had been known in Egypt and the Middle East for centuries, prized especially for its fruit – mixed with water it produces a refreshing drink. This fruit, sold in Cairo markets, was understood by a Venetian naturalist in the late 16th century to be called bu hobab, although this may have been bu hibab, ‘the fruit with many seeds’. Locally, the whole tree could be turned to use: the leaves and flowers were eaten as salad, the seeds were roasted like coffee beans, the pliable bark was pounded into rope or its fibres were woven into cloth, and the hard outer shell of the fruit made excellent dishes or containers. The enormous trunk of older trees could store great quantities of water, which was then available during the dry season. The trees were occasionally fitted with a tap for ease of drawing. The huge size and hollow centres mean that trunks have been turned to a variety of uses, including a pub, a prison and a restaurant.
The trees’ vast size – as much as 30 m (100 ft) in circumference – gives the genus greater girth (if not total volume) than the giant redwoods of California, and early naturalists assumed that baobabs were amazingly long-lived. Adanson reasoned from the fact that two trees inscribed by 15th- and 16th-century travellers had grown so little between then and his visit that the trees must be upwards of 5,000 years old. The explorer-missionary David Livingstone admired the trees, but didn’t think they had survived Noah’s Flood. Modern estimates give the tree a maximum lifespan of about 2,000 years, although precise determination is difficult.
Baobab’s natural distribution is also unusual. The genus consists of eight species: the African one (Adansonia digitata) is the most common. It prefers relatively dry savannah conditions, about 450–600 m (1,475–1,970 ft) above sea level. There is also a single Australian species (A. gibbosa), indigenous to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The other six species are all found in Madagascar, where baobabs almost certainly originated. It is thought that perhaps a million years ago hard-coated fruit floated the relatively short distance from Madagascar to the African coast, and then made the much longer journey to Australia. Time, and different environmental conditions, led to the two new species.
Baobab near the Bank of the Lue (1858), an oil painting by Thomas Baines which captures the tremendous girth of this group of trees on a tributary of the Zambezi River. The baobabs fascinated European travellers not least for the use of their hollow trunks as burial chambers for African bards or griots. These people were refused burial for fear that their involvement with the occult during life might contaminate the soil or water, and in the dry heat they became mummified.
Its unusual size and shape, combined with the many uses to which the tree could be put, endowed the baobab with special meanings to native peoples. Trees could have a spiritual significance, and doubled as places of worship. Many have individual names and when they die have been accorded full funeral rites. An ability to grow new trunks from fallen branches means that a single tree can extend over a large area. Although specimen trees have been grown in many tropical countries, at least two of Madagascar’s six species are now threatened because of land clearing and neglect.
Welwitschia mirabilis
Out of all question the most wonderful plant ever brought to this country – and the very ugliest.
Joseph Dalton Hooker, 1862
The Namib, one of the world’s oldest deserts, runs down the Atlantic coastal plain of southwest Africa. Rainfall is meagre and erratic. Coastal fogs bring vital water to the plant and animal life, drip by condensed drip. On a small strip in the north of this desert region lives the ‘ugliest’ plant in the world. It may not be beautiful, but the Welwitschia mirabilis is certainly extraordinary.
Sunk into the earth is a deep, water-seeking taproot. Near its top a network of spongy roots reaches out to extract any hint of groundwater from the infrequently wetted watercourses the plants inhabit. Above this stands a short, partly submerged woody stem, with a dished top. Each side of the stem gives rise to a single leaf, though occasional plants have more than one set of leaves. The leaves continue to grow indefinitely from the base, increasing in length 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in.) each year for at least 600 years. Lose a leaf and the plant dies. Over such long periods sandstorms rag the leaves into ribbons, giving the illusion of more than the actual two. They provide occasional food for grazing animals, both large – antelopes, rhino – and small – tiny insects known as microarthropods.
Deserts make enormous demands on their flora, and it is odd to see such large leaves in this environment. Welwitschias are better than most plants at reflecting solar radiation, but they lack some of the usual leaf adaptations of desert dwellers – small size, specialized water storage organs and waxy surfaces. What they have evolved to do is practice flexibility in the way their stomata – the tiny pores that allow water and gases in and out – open and close, and in the storage of carbon (from carbon dioxide) as organic acids ready for photosynthesis.
Welwitschia is certainly an ancient plant, tracing its direct ancestors back beyond 200 million years ago when seed-bearing plants had first gained dominance. Fossils indicate that the Welwitschia family were once much more widespread than their current circumscribed homeland, and lived in much moister conditions than today. While they may have thrived as the continents of Africa and South America separated and outlived the extinction of the dinosaurs, welwitschias have only been part of modern botanical science since the 1860s when reports and material from two explorers reached the centre of the botanical world: the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London.
A younger (top) and more mature specimen (bottom) of Welwitschia mirabilis (not to the same scale). The leaves of the older plant have the characteristic shredded appearance of a long life in the desert’s winds.
The plant is named for Friedrich Welwitsch, an Austrian-born doctor, botanist and explorer who went collecting for the Portuguese government and found his strange plant in the southernmost part of their colony of Angola. Although the plant immediately attracted the attention of the botanical community, his bosses were disappointed. Welwitschia might be a unique plant, but it had no economic importance.
The English artist and explorer Thomas Baines trekked into the Namib and sent material to Kew, where Joseph Dalton Hooker spent many arduous hours at the microscope, producing an outstanding book on this peculiar plant. Hard work this may have been, but it didn’t compare with Welwitsch’s suffering in his pursuit of plants. As was all too common among explorers, he endured malaria, dysentery, scurvy and badly ulcerated legs. All this for a plant ‘that he could do nothing but kneel down in the burning soil and gaze at … half in fear lest a touch should prove it a figment of the imagination’.
Victoria amazonica
No words can describe the grandeur and beauty of the plant.
Joseph Paxton to the Duke of Devonshire, 2 November 1849
For Robert Schomburgk finding the ‘vegetable wonder’ was particularly special. His exploration of Guyana’s rivers on behalf of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society had been fraught, but on 1 January 1837, in a shallow basin of the River Berbice, he came upon the massive leaves (up to 2.5 m or 8 ft across) of the giant waterlily floating on the still water. Immense white and pink flowers (30 cm/12 in. across) were supported on thick, prickly stalks, and as night fell Schomburgk became aware of their delicious pineapple-tinged scent. He wasn’t the first European to see this plant (that happened in Bolivia in 1801), but its rediscovery was celebrated. Seeds sent by Schomburgk were successfully germinated by William Hooker, director at Kew Gardens, and the plants would be the first to flower outside South America.
The giant waterlily, eventually named Victoria amazonica in honour of the British queen, caused a sensation when Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, succeeded in bringing the plant he’d received from Kew into bloom in November 1849. Paxton had to design a dedicated glasshouse for the waterlily’s heated tanks, such was the plant’s typical rate of growth (15 cm or 6 in. a day) and need for warmth. This multi-talented man would go on to produce the blueprint for the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in 1851. For both the waterlily house and the Crystal Palace, Paxton drew inspiration from nature – in fact from the underside of the waterlily’s leaf, a ‘natural engineering feat’.
Readers of the Illustrated London News were already familiar with the whimsical image of Paxton’s daughter Annie, her weight distributed on a tin tray, standing on a waterlily’s leaf. As he would explain at a meeting of the Society of Arts – with a piece of leaf as a prop – he had exploited the plant’s innate load-bearing ability, with cantilevers stretching from the leaf’s middle to the edge and the connecting system of stout but flexible ribs and cross braces, for his innovative ‘ridge and furrow’ roof design.
The flower is a 48-hour marvel. Opening white, scented and heated by a thermochemical reaction on its first evening, the female flower attracts its pollinating beetle, already laden with pollen. The flower subsequently closes, trapping the beetle, which eats, stays warm and fertilizes the flower. Then, changing from white to pink, female to male, and lacking warmth and scent, the flower opens again the next evening, releasing the beetle. Now covered in fresh pollen, the insect moves on in search of more fragrant white warmth. The fertilized flower closes for the final time and disappears under the water, job done.
The stunning flower and a section of the equally impressive leaf of the giant waterlily. Many botanists have subsequently shared Joseph Paxton’s careful study of the leaf’s architecture to understand what prevents it from distorting in agitated water. The immense surface also needs to be able to drain water. The slightly depressed ribs channel surface water to two drainage sinuses and water is also shed through special pores.
This beetle–waterlily synergy may have been happening for a very long time. Fossils of Microvictoria svitkoana dating from some 90 million years ago have been placed with Victoria in the family Nymphaeaceae. There is such correspondence between the structure of the living flowers and those of the fossils (found in an old clay pit at Sayreville, New Jersey, USA) that these ancient blooms must also have been insect pollinated. What is different is the size. The Microvictoria are minute, just 1.6 mm (1/16 in.) in diameter. This ancient lineage can tell us much about the emergence of the angiosperms, or flowering plants, in the history of life. Schomburgk might well have been pleased with this new, fossilized ‘vegetable wonder’.
Nepenthes spp.
I may here mention a few of the more striking vegetable productions of Borneo. The wonderful Pitcher-plants … here reach their greatest development.
Alfred Russel Wallace, 1869
As a general rule, insects (and other animals) eat plants, but some plants strike back. Around 650 species of plants (and a few fungi) attract and digest animals, mostly insects but occasionally larger prey. This seems so contrary to the symmetry of the natural world that the great naturalist Linnaeus refused to believe it, even though many examples had been seen and illustrated. Charles Darwin, whose classic book of 1875 on the subject made them better known to the world, called such plants ‘insectivorous’, but their even greater exploitation of animal products means that ‘carnivorous’ is now the preferred term.
Carnivorous plants, which are widely distributed and belong to several botanical groups, use a variety of active and passive mechanisms to trap their suppers. They often inhabit wet areas, although a few are adapted to drier climates. Some, including the Venus Flytrap (Dionaea muscipula – Darwin called it ‘the most wonderful plant in the world’), produce sticky excretions that attract their prey, after which the trap snaps shut on them. Others have attractive scents. Pitcher plants, named from their remarkable leaf modifications shaped like jugs or pitchers, are passive and simply rely on insects or other animals, attracted by colour, scent or nectar, falling into the liquid contained within. The pitchers vary widely in colour, shape and size; some can hold as much as 2 litres (4 pints), and rats have been seen in them.
The liquid inside the pitcher, although often diluted with rainwater, is naturally slightly acidic. Many species have a flap over the top to limit the amount of rainfall that collects. On the inside of the pitcher is an area called the ‘pitfall zone’, which has a waxy secretion. When touched by the intruder, surface crystals drop off, making the inner coat extremely slippery. When something is trapped, the acidity of the liquid increases dramatically, and this aids digestive enzymes in the breakdown of the tissues of the victim, from which the plant absorbs nitrogen and other nutrients. The pitcher’s walls are thin but extremely tough.
Asian pitcher plants belong to the genus Nepenthes. It contains about 110 species that are distributed throughout tropical regions from India to northern Australia, with the highest concentration in the Malay Archipelago. Although it is a large genus, individual species generally have quite small ranges, and a few have been found just once, so are known only from their type specimen. However, many species are very vigorous and some grow well on wasteland. Most are vines, and can be as long as 20 m (66 ft); a few are shrubs. The range of adaptations is astonishing, with some growing out of tree trunks and others in very dry, stony ground.
Nepenthes distillatoria, the native pitcher plant of Sri Lanka, was one of the earliest recorded in the botanical literature, in the later 17th century. Its stems were traditionally twisted and used as cattle rope in Sri Lanka.
Serious European fascination began in the late 18th century, when specimens were shipped back, and during the Victorian period many were grown in hothouses. The challenge to gardeners was to reproduce the appropriate growing conditions for a particular species, depending on its natural habitat. Trade in all Nepenthes species is now controlled.
The development of a ‘pitcher’ to trap animals also exists in a family of New World plants, which include the Cobra Lily and several species of the genus Sarracenia. In a case of tit-for-tat, mosquitoes that are resistant to the digestive enzymes of one species use the fluid in the pitcher as a breeding pool.
Rafflesia arnoldii
Come with me, Sir come! a flower, very large, beautiful, wonderful!
Joseph Arnold, letter to Dawson Turner, Pulau Lebar, on the Manna River, Sumatra, May 1818
Buds of Rafflesia patma increase in size after emerging from their host’s roots over a protracted period. They can be vulnerable in their forest habitat – mammals such as porcupines and tree shrews eat them, crows damage them looking for insects and a range of animals trample them.
On 19 May 1818, Dr Joseph Arnold botanizing in the rainforests of southern Sumatra met with what he judged must be the world’s largest flower. At up to 1 m (3 ft) in diameter and 7 kg (15 lb) in weight, Rafflesia arnoldii has maintained its place at the top of the big flower league. But size is just one of its many fascinating attributes.
Arnold, a naval surgeon, had been befriended by Sir Stamford Raffles, himself a keen amateur naturalist, who in 1817 had been appointed lieutenant-governor at Benkulen (Bengkulu) on the west coast of Sumatra. Raffles was delighted when Arnold accepted the post of naturalist and it was during a field trip they made in the rainforest, two days upriver from the coast, that a servant ran to bring news of this ‘greatest prodigy of the vegetable world’. In just over five weeks Arnold would be dead of fever, probably malaria. The plant was later named Rafflesia arnoldii in honour of both men.
Arnold was not the first European to see a Rafflesia. That honour belongs to Louis August Deschamps, who discovered a smaller species in 1797, subsequently called Rafflesia patma. Some 19 species have now been identified, dotted across the islands of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines and on the Malay/Thai peninsula. They are rare plants, threatened by habitat destruction as the rainforests are cleared for timber or land.
All Rafflesias are parasites. They have no leaves, roots or stem; and with no chlorophyll they do not photosynthesize. Most of their life is in fact spent as thread-like filaments hidden within the tissues of their host plant, a few species of the vine Tetrastigma (which is in the grape family). The strange flowers emerge through the bark of the vine’s roots as tightly closed buds that grow to resemble cabbage heads, before five, thick, warty-looking petals unfold. Rafflesia have separate male and female flowers and the pollen is carried from one to the other by carrion flies, for these short-lived giants (in bloom for five days) resemble a rotting carcass and have a scent to match, hence their popular name, the corpse flower. In return for their aid in pollination the flies receive no reward: Rafflesia are doubly parasitic.
Carrion mimicry is frequently associated with floral gigantism and may be connected in part with why these super blooms evolved. During a rapid expansion in the size of Rafflesia flowers there was also a switch to pollination by carrion flies or beetles (sapromyophily). In a kind of arms race, the bigger the flower the more attractive it is and so the more often it is visited, particularly if large carrion are preferred. It may also have been a way for different species of Rafflesia to co-exist in the same locale without risk of hybridization. Different sizes make the mechanics of pollination very difficult and Rafflesia species range from 10 cm (4 in.) to the giant arnoldii.
There are no fossils of these plants. They emerged some 46 million years ago and in that time have also experienced extensive gene transfers from their host plants. If their habitat is destroyed and they become extinct, the chance to understand more of what has driven their extraordinary evolution will be lost forever.
The corpse flower, Rafflesia arnoldii, has the world’s largest individual flower but neither roots nor leaves. A parasite, it relies upon a host, a type of vine found in Sumatra and Borneo. The flower bud bursts through the bark, opens, grows and emits the stench of putrefying flesh to attract carrion flies for pollination.
Helianthus annuus
… in one summer, beeing sowne of a seed in Aprill, it hath risen up to the height of fourteene foot … one floure was in weight three pound and two ounces … and sixteen inches broad.
John Gerard, 1636
‘Portrait de l’herbe du soleil de Monardes’, in Claude Duret’s Histoire admirable des plantes et herbes … (1605). Nicolas Monardes never travelled to the New World, but his botanical garden in Seville was stocked with South American plants and his descriptions of the sunflower were among the earliest in Europe.
The sunflower’s prodigious ability to capture the sun’s energy for rapid growth could be said to have brought out a competitive streak. One of the features herbalists in 16th-century Europe reported about this new plant from the Americas was the considerable height gained in its single growing season. The current record stands at 8.23 m (27 ft), for a sunflower grown in Kaarst, Germany.
Whether or not the people of eastern North America vied to grow the tallest, they had been cultivating sunflowers for a long time before the plant reached the Old World. Evidence points to domestication between 5,000 and 4,500 years ago. Large, single-headed sunflowers were part of the early crop complex, serving as an important source of edible oil, as the plant still does. Wild sunflowers also continued to be collected, eaten and used in medical and ceremonial contexts in the western states.
Early trade routes probably introduced domesticated sunflowers to Mexico. Archaeological evidence certainly hints at a broad and ancient use beyond the table. Sunflowers were part of Aztec ceremonies connected with sun worship. The Mexican flowers were yellow-centred – it’s not hard to see the association between this and the life-giving sun. After the Spanish conquest the Catholic clergy sought to stamp out such adulation.
Sunflower heads are made up of numerous small, tubular disc florets packed together in the centre of the flower and surrounded by ray florets, which resemble a ring of petals. The disc florets form intricate, intersecting spirals, an effect easier to see after each floret has produced its ‘seed’ or achene (in fact a fruit containing a seed). These patterns are known as Fibonacci spirals: the number of achenes in each spiral follows the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 (each number is the sum of the previous two), and each seed is turned through the golden angle of around 137 degrees. This is the most economical way to pack in the possible 1,000-plus achenes in a flower head, so that all of them can be the same size and with no crowding at the centre or wasted space at the edges. The pattern may help to improve the spacing of mirrors in concentrated solar power plants to reflect the sun’s rays towards a central electricity-generating tower, while reducing wasteful shadows.
The sunflower in this watercolour by an unknown Indian artist in the Company style is the epitome of a solar disc. There is evidence that sunflowers can play a role in phytoremediation – using plants to decontaminate soil and, if grown hydroponically, water.
Opened sunflower heads don’t track the sun (heliotropism); they mostly face eastwards as if to catch the sunrise. But the actively growing parts of the flower – unopened buds, with their green bracts and young leaves – do. Special cells near the base of the bud and leaf stalk regulate water pressure, facilitating directional growth. The green parts are the plant’s powerhouses. If they can maximize the uptake of solar energy, and water, carbon dioxide and essential nutrients are also abundant, growth will be optimized. The sunflower can be used directly for biomass energy production, but perhaps its greatest contribution will lie in the inspiration it provides to solar engineers. Photovoltaic cells mounted so they can move and follow the sun are potentially more efficient than fixed arrays at generating electricity. But movement costs energy. Engineers have developed a flexible support system that utilizes the sun’s heat to tilt the cells, overcoming this problem. Patents are pending: sunflower sun worship may be back in fashion.
Ginkgo biloba
This Tree’s leaf, which, from the Orient, Is entrusted to my garden, Lets us savour a secret meaning, As to how it edifies the learned man.
J. W. von Goethe, 1815
The unmistakable leaves of the ginkgo in Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amoenitatum Exoticarum (1712). Kaempfer was the first outsider to describe the tree and he probably drew this illustration himself. There are still trees alive in the region of Nagasaki that would have been growing when he visited.
The ginkgo is ancient: its ancestors could have been grazed by dinosaurs, so old is the tree. Its distinctive foliage, with its bilobed leaves (hence its species name), has been preserved in the fossil record dating back about 200 million years. Several aspects of the ginkgo tree’s mode of reproduction and internal structure also highlight its antiquity, making it a living laboratory of evolution.
Individual ginkgo trees can live several hundred years: the oldest in England, in Kew Gardens, was planted by 1762, when George III was on the throne. Many specimens in China, Korea and Japan, where the tree is revered, are even older – a few are said to have lived for several thousand years, though these ages are probably legendary. Some are possibly more than 1,000 years old, however, and the Grand Ginkgo King, in Li Jiawan, southern China, is about 30 m (100 ft) tall and sports a trunk more than 5 m (16 ft) across. Many of the old giants are found at shrines and sites of pilgrimage. In oriental cultures the tree is associated with longevity, and its products – leaves as well as seeds – are used medicinally for a variety of complaints, including memory loss and urinary problems. The nuts are also consumed at the table and ginkgo tea is sometimes drunk.
Millions of years ago, the ginkgo was widely spread across the world, including much of North America. But it failed to adapt to colder climates, and perhaps it lost whatever animals aided in the fertilization of the separate male and female trees. There are two remote forests in China where the stands may be original, but ginkgos have been venerated there for so long that humans may have planted even these ancient forests. More certain is that the tree was transported to Japan and Korea centuries ago and planted in gardens, temples and shrines. Legend says that Confucius sat under ginkgo trees, reading, meditating and teaching.
It was in Japan that the German naturalist and doctor Engelbert Kaempfer described and named the tree in 1691, from his transliteration of its Japanese name. He was intrigued by the biological peculiarities of the tree’s reproduction and the putrid smell of the fruit produced by females. This smell (likened to fresh vomit) is so powerful that male specimens, which produce no fruit, were favoured for planting in the West. Seeds and young trees proved adaptable to a wide variety of climates and situations, even polluted cities. The tree is a familiar sight in New York, Beijing and many other modern urban landscapes, in streets and parks. From the brink of total extinction a thousand or so years ago, the ginkgo is now safe, and in a reversal of the usual pattern this is through human agency.
The ginkgo’s autumnal leaves are stunning in the weeks before they rapidly fall. It has been doing this for millions of years, which makes it a great survivor. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than by six ginkgos of Hiroshima: two years after the atomic bomb dropped on 6 August 1945, they sent up shoots from their charred remains. One was less than a mile from the bomb’s epicentre.
Robert Fortune commissioned a series of drawings of trees during his last visit to China in the 1850s, including Salisburia adiantifolia as the ginkgo was then known. Painted by an unknown watercolourist, each tree was accompanied by a human figure – the artist only agreed to undertake the commission if he could add his people.