Plate XIX Ginkgo

Ginkgo biloba

A leaf that has not needed to change.

The ginkgo is the last of its line. Every other species in its order vanished before the first flowering plant. What remains is a single tree, kept alive in temple courtyards through a long extinction, then carried out of China as a curiosity, then planted on streets everywhere because almost nothing kills it.

The leaf is the signature. Dichotomous venation — every vein splits in two, again and again, from the petiole outward. No midrib, no reticulation; a fan of forks. This is the primitive arrangement. The ginkgo never adopted the branching network the rest of the seed plants converged on, and the leaf is the same shape it was two hundred million years ago.

Engelbert Kaempfer

1690 — Nagasaki

First European to describe the tree. Wrote down the Japanese name from a misread character; the spelling stuck.

Carl Linnaeus

1771 — Uppsala

Took Kaempfer's spelling into the binomial system. Ginkgo biloba — two-lobed — for the notch at the top of the leaf.

Charles Darwin

1859 — Down House

Called it a living fossil. The phrase was his; the ginkgo was his exemplar.

A specimen does not need to argue for its place; it shows up and is unchanged. The fan is the proof. The fork is the mechanism.

The fan remembers the fork.