China — Ginkgo · Deep Time
The dinosaurs came, and went, beneath a tree that already looked like this. Its whole family died out. It didn't get the message.
Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving species in the division Ginkgophyta. It has no close living relatives at all — it represents a “missing link” between ferns and the seed-bearing plants, the conifers. The whole of its lineage narrowed to a single thread, and this is it.
The tree has remained virtually unchanged for over 200 million years. What grows in a temple courtyard today is, in every meaningful sense, the same organism that grew when the earth belonged to reptiles.
It is one of the very few seed-producing plants — alongside the cycads — with multiflagellated, swimming sperm cells. That is a primitive trait, the signature of ferns and mosses. The ginkgo still reproduces the way the world did before flowers.
Its leaves carry complex terpenoids called ginkgolides and bilobalides — compounds found in absolutely no other plant species on the planet. Two hundred million years of solitude, written into the chemistry of a leaf.
Ginkgo trees have distinct biological sexes: a tree is either exclusively male, producing pollen, or exclusively female, producing seeds. Among large trees, that separation is relatively rare — and it will matter greatly in the second chamber.