Ginkgo: The Gilded Fossil

AT SOME POINT in their education, every botany student is introduced to the ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba). I became very familiar with a huge female ginkgo tree as a freshman botany student at Ohio Wesleyan University — not in any botany class, but outside the window of my Greek literature class. That tree has since been removed, but at the time, the smell of its fruit littering the ground and crushed daily under the feet of hundreds of students filled the air with a vomit-like odor. It was cringe-worthy and memorable.

THE DINOSAUR PLANT

is native to Southeast Asia; it’s often called a living fossil, because it can be found in the fossil record at the same time as the dinosaurs. Ginkgoes have also remained essentially unchanged for 200 million years, and are now the only plants of their kind. They’re the only