In deep autumn the ginkgo puts on the grandest farewell of city and mountain: overnight the whole tree of small fan-shaped leaves turns gold, and when the wind passes, ten thousand golden fans shake loose, paving a radiant “golden avenue.” Few realize that this tree, the most beautiful of autumn, is a living fossil that has crossed two hundred million years—it was already there when the dinosaurs died out, and it is still here now that humans have arrived.

A Tree Older Than the Dinosaurs

The ginkgo is one of the oldest surviving relict plants among seed plants, its origins reaching back about two hundred million years. During the ice ages, ginkgo died out successively in Europe and North America, surviving only by luck in the mountains of eastern China—hence its title “the giant panda of the plant world.” It walks down from the remote past with a leaf shape almost unchanged for two hundred million years: one ginkgo leaf is a bookmark stamped with prehistoric memory. Nearly all the world’s ginkgoes today descend from China—they are “seed emigrants” of this ancient family, carrying a two-hundred-million-year story to the world.

A Tree with Two Names

Ginkgo is also called “grandfather-grandson tree”—grandfather plants, grandson eats the fruit—speaking volumes about its slow growth and long life. It is also dioecious: male trees only bloom, female trees bear the white nuts. In deep autumn, golden fan leaves fall together with orange-yellow fruit; peel back the pulp and you find the milky-white hard-shelled “white fruit” (baiguo), which, cooked, is soft, sticky, and faintly bitter—a seasonal snack of autumn. But remember: the white fruit is mildly toxic and must be cooked, and eaten sparingly—around ten nuts a day is the adult limit.

— Ouyang Xiu, “Duck Feet” —

Duck feet grow south of the Yangtze,

name and reality do not quite match.

In crimson sacks it entered the tribute,

and the ginkgo became noble in the Central Plains.

(The Song people called it “duck feet” for its leaf shape; because its nuts entered the imperial tribute, it gained the name ginkgo.)

Two Kinds of Gold in Deep Autumn

• See the leaves: The ginkgo’s autumn gold is pure and unmixed—the “cleanest” stroke of autumn color; its fan leaves have fine, dense veins, and the ancients pressed them into bookmarks, calling them “duck-feet bookmarks.”
• Smell the fruit: Ripe ginkgo fruit gives off a peculiar stale green odor that makes people pinch their noses—but that very “stink” reminds passersby that the fruit is ready to pick; it is also a phenological signal of deep autumn.
• Sense the life: Ginkgo lives extremely long; trees a thousand years old still grow luxuriant. Temples and old monasteries plant ginkgoes—one tree is a living history of the temple.

The Waiting Philosophy of a Thousand-Year Tree

Ginkgo grows astonishingly slowly: grandfather plants, grandson eats the fruit—a full harvest takes two generations to wait for. But once it is established, it counts its life in millennia—green fans in spring, gilded gold in autumn, turning every changing season into a celebration. Standing under a thousand-year ginkgo, people fall quiet of themselves: how many dynasties, how many partings and reunions has one tree witnessed, and yet it still sprouts on time and sheds on time, never missing an autumn. What it teaches us is not “faster” but “longer”—some good things are worth waiting for with a lifetime, or even several generations.

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Keywords: ginkgo · grandfather-grandson tree · white fruit · living fossil · deep-autumn gold