04 December 2007

glorious ginkgo

oh, glorious ginkgo! how i underestimated you!

well, this post would have been more timely a few weeks back, but here we go...

when i first came to seoul, i quickly noticed there was a tree of choice lining the streets. seoul doesn't have many landscaped medians or sidewalks, so i felt that this seemingly unremarkable tree, with its rough dark bark and small, pale-green, fan-shaped leaves, was a disappointing choice. why couldn't seoul have imported japan's beloved sakura or some of the big maples found in new england towns?

but when fall swept in and the temps fell, these previously unremarkable trees morphed. suddenly their hohum leaves turned solid gold, which contrasted beautifully with their black bark.

i was in love.

wasn't it camus who said something like colorful leaves made fall a second spring? anyway, being the plant dork that i am, i should have known that these were ginkgo biloba trees, known here in korea as 은행 (eunhaeng), or bank trees, and popular in asia thanks to buddha's reported affection for them.

as their new number one fan, let me tell you a bit about the fabulous ginkgo.

why the peculiar name, you ask? it's thanks to two mistakes. when chinese characters are translated into japanese, multiple pronunciations are possible. leave it to whitey, a german botanist named engelbert kaempfer, to mispronounce "icho" as "ginkyo" when he first laid eyes on the tree in 1690 while visiting japan. error #2 occured when his notes were transcribed, turning the y into a g, thus, "ginkgo".

but, there's far more to this living fossil, which has no close relatives and has survived basically unchanged over 270 million years and a couple of mass extinctions. it makes sense that seoul city planners would choose it, since it is disease and insect resistant and long-lived. re: the latter, there's supposedly a 3,000-year-old specimen in china, and four trees located within 2 kilometers of the hiroshima atomic bomb site, were among the few things to survive the blast. they are still there today.

back to the present. around the same time as the trees' golden confetti was falling on the streets, the females of the species were casting their cute little fruits to the street, where ajummas collected them en masse. but the berries that didn't make it into old ladies' kitchens usually got crushed beneath a foot or a tire. the feeling and sound of them popping beneath your soles are fun. stretching at the gym and noticing the weirdly strong ginkgo poop smell on your shoes isn't.

but poopy air is a small price to pay for the beauty they bring (tho maybe korean planners should go the way of some of their american counterparts, who only plant male trees). although you may be more familiar with ginkgo thanks to the nutrition supplements made from its leaf extracts for memory, concentration or vertigo, please don't forget it's best asset, its wonderful golden leaves come next fall.

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