For the first time this tree appeared on Earth 350 million years ago, in the Devonian period. Since then, it has hardly changed. This is a real living fossil. Some trees in Japan are two millennia old.
What would you feel if in the zoo, in the same aviary with an elephant, you suddenly saw … a living mammoth or an even more ancient creature? So far, such a meeting is possible only in the virtual world. But the ginkgo tree, which has survived since time immemorial, grows in botanical gardens around the world and even in some parks along roads and beaches.
The crown of the ginkgo tree was green a hundred and two hundred million years ago, when terrifying dinosaurs reigned supreme on land, sea and air. Everywhere along the shores of swamps and lakes, which were inhabited by ferocious reptiles, ginkgo grew. The pterodactyls rested on their branches. Vegetarian lizards chewed their leaves lazily. Lifting their snake heads up to the sky, they swallowed "nuts" - the fruits of ginkgo.
In the Jurassic deposits, numerous prints of leaves, fruits, flowers, and trunks of a whole family of ginkgoids were found. Fossil remains have been found in Ukraine, the Urals, Greenland, North America and elsewhere. Thanks to the lush prosperity of these trees, the existence of giant vegetarian dinosaurs became possible.
Wild gingko only survived in China and Japan. Here they grew near temples and tombs. And here they were seen by Dr. Kempfer, who served as a doctor at the Dutch embassy in Nagasaki at the beginning of the 18th century. Some of the sacred trees that grew near the royal tombs were of very venerable age. One of them - a thirty-meter ginkgo - was planted 1 thousand 200 years ago in the garden of the Japanese emperor.
Trees were considered sacred in Japan. They have been lovingly and carefully grown in the most revered places. One of the court ladies, the nurse of Emperor Naihaku-Kojo, dying, asked not to build any monument on the grave, but to plant a ginkgo so that her soul would continue to live in this tree.
Tall, distinguished by slender trunks with light bark, with unusually long branches extending at right angles, ginkgo had peculiar leaves. The shape of the leaf almost exactly repeated the silhouette of a mandatory attribute in Japan - a fan. The fan-shaped venation, its wavy edges, and a graceful cut dividing the leaf into two lobes turned out to be unusual in the leaf. By autumn, the leaves were turning a delicate golden color, and at the top of the tree - in carmine. People in droves went at this time to the trees-beauties, respectfully picking up the first leaves they dropped. Girls used them for fortune telling.
Dr. Kempfer was the first European to discover the tree, but also to deliver its seeds to Europe in 1730. The Dutchman called what he discovered in Japan and unknown to Europeans by the strange tree word "ginkgo". "Gin" is Chinese for "silver".
Promotional video:
The fruits of the tree bear some resemblance to the shriveled apricot. Its seeds were planted in a botanical garden in Utrecht (Holland), and soon the first ginkgoes were green here, the first since the dinosaurs died out on Earth. In Europe, this tree has become the pride and decoration of the best parks and botanical gardens.
Ginkgo is a dioecious plant. This means that only female flowers develop on one tree, and only male flowers, with stamens and pollen, on the other. In Montpellier, France, an excellent ginkgo tree grew, lush, blooming, but, alas, sterile. Once the great German poet I. V. Goethe, traveling in France, saw in Montpellier a living fossil tree green in its primeval beauty. He, amazed, stood in front of him for a long time, and later wrote in his honor the poem Gingo biloba, which today millions of German schoolchildren learn by heart. As you know, Goethe was fond of botany, and, according to legend, it was he who suggested the idea to bring from England a branch of ginkgo with male flowers. She was grafted on a tree in Montpellier, the same was done in the poet's homeland, in Germany.
In Russia, the first ginkgo was settled in the Crimea. In 1818, H. Steven, director of the Nikitsky Botanical Garden, returning from Western Europe, while still at the pier in Yalta, hastened to please his employees: "The Germans gave us two dozen ginkgo seedlings, which they call the Goethe tree."
Over time, thanks to the selection work of Russian botanists, ginkgo has spread to the more northern regions of the country, reaching Moscow and St. Petersburg, where it grows only in botanical gardens. But in Ukraine, large trees can be found in Kiev, Kharkov and, of course, on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus.