Ginkgo

The very first time I paid attention to the yellow triangular leaves of ginkgo tree was when I visited Hiroshima more than four years ago. After taking a stroll around the city, I saw quite a number of ginkgo trees. It is called Ginkgo biloba, "biloba" meaning "two lobes", which indeed its leaf is.

I learned more about Ginkgo after my recent reading of Survivors, written by the paleontologist Richard Fortey. This tree appears to have survived for a long time, even longer than the dinosaurs. The more I read about it and the more I thought of the ginkgo tree, the more impressed I got with it.

Living fossil of Ginkgo biloba has been found to survive the blast of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War, even though it was only 1.1 kilometres from the epicentre of the explosion. Ginkgo trees simply regenerated from scarred trunks one year after the total destruction. No question, it is a survivor.

For those of you who have seen the fan-shaped ginkgo leaves, you'll find veins radiating into them from their petioles. That means they are easily recognised in the fossil state, and fossils tell us that the ginkgo must have survived for 280 million years. And then you will reckon that Ginkgo biloba must have survived several mass extinctions. Atomic bombs, as Fortey says, is probably small potatoes in comparison.