Ginkgo: An evolutionary and cultural biography

it's great fun to be back here at the Arboretum and you know in a way it should have been Peter Dell Tredici who wrote this book I mean Peter who worked here for so many years and collected so many of the great ginkgos that are in the living collections here's the real expert on on ginkgo but while at cue and also to some extent while at the University of Chicago and then eventually Yale I decided to have some fun and try and write a popular book so instead of the the two technical books that I've written in the myriad of papers that maybe one or two people have read I decided to try and write something that maybe a few more people would read so this is purely in a way for fun and thank you for staying at the end of a very long day to listen to this story of ginkgo and part of my fascination with it revolves around this tree one of the oldest ginkgos in the UK may be the oldest it was planted around about 1760 I like to think of it as one of the great celebrity ginkgos of the world if you could if you could interview this tree it would have some really great things to tell you about all the changes that it's seen not only at the garden but in but in London more generally and all of the famous people like Sir Joseph Banks who would have seen this tree or George the third who would have seen this tree it was just about a hundred yards from our house when we lived in the garden so we would see it very often it's one of the great old lions that dates from the very origins of of Q 250 years ago now so the book sort of starts there and the marketers you know always want to play with the title so the title we ended up with was the tree that time forgot I'm more or less happy with that that title but what I really wanted to call it was an evolutionary and cultural biography of this tree they didn't think that would work so well in the general market but that's really what what the book book here so it's a kind of a biography of tree and like any good biography it has its ups and downs so this really follows the the biography of Ginkgo from its origin and proliferation and spread across the planet to its decline and their near extinction and then it's reprieve and resurgence and renewal at the hands of people and so in a sense ginko is a kind of counterfactual to all of the doom and gloom that one often hears it's in a way a good news story a tree that's been saved by its association with people so if you want to see great ginkgos you really need to go to East Asia and of course so there's a picture of me you can just about see me with one enormous gingko on Kyushu in southern Japan and these really are magnificent trees of course especially in the fall when that foliage turns this bright lemon yellow but of course it's the it's that leaf this distinctive leaf that really makes gingko one of the world's most distinctive trees you know once you've got that image in your mind you're not going to mistake it really for anything else and it's a it's a leaf that that people have turned to so this is a leaf actually brought back by someone from Kew not so long ago from Suzhou in China the Chinese city of gardens and it's got stamped onto it there a beautiful image of the master of the nets garden in Suzhou and in Suzhou there are many large ginkgos but gingko is a tree that that I like to say sort of has a brand not many trees have a brand but if you start looking around and if you're a gink afar like me you see gingko kind of everywhere people have sort of adopted it often it's associated with health and wellness like this one at the top and then this one at the bottom I took yesterday on the way from the train to the to the bed-and-breakfast here here in Boston I mean it's everywhere once you get your eye into a gingko you see it everywhere you see it on people's tombstones and I gave this talk in North Carolina and a couple came out of the audience to show me their wedding rings and some people are really attached to ginkgo and I I I want actually if you go on and on the web you can find an alarming number of ginkgo tattoos and this is one of the more more savory of the images that that you might see on the web but people really like ginkgo and the best web resource for for ginkgo is the ginkgo pages produced by a lady in the Netherlands who's done a terrific job on pulling together all sorts of ginkgo information and if you're going to any city in the world and you want to know where the best ginkgos are you can find it out from looking at this you're going to Buenos Aires you want to know where the best ginkgo Yves Buenos Aires it's on the ginkgo pages there's a lot of - ginkgo stuff on the web so if you go on Flickr and look for ginkgo or at least they're these numbers are probably out of date it's much higher than that now but you'll get thirty thousand records if you type in ginkgo and if you don't know how to spell ginkgo you can get sixty thousand records actually it turns out that quite a lot of people are not sure about how to spell ginkgo and if you read Conan Doyle's lost world you'll find that he also has the G and the K transpose so this amazing ginkgo leaf is a really sort of prominent motif around us and I love this picture I don't know why I think it's just because of the sort of simplicity of it but it this was on a boardwalk leading me in Korea to this huge gingko probably the tallest gingko in the world at the young Muenster temple in south korea and really the whole of that temple is sort of focused obviously it's a buddhist temple but it's also has a strong focus on gingko so as you go into the center of the temple there and if you look at those little lanterns on the ceiling and you look just a little more closely you find that there are these cut out yellow gingko leaves on which people have written their wishes and prayers for the future um I thought I'd say a little bit about the the kind of life history Jenko which is interesting obviously it's a deciduous tree it starts to the buds start to burst here in this part of the world in in April and the leaves are very kind of characteristic this is a photograph I took in Japan just a couple of weeks ago you see how those leaves kind of unfurl and and then of course they're absolutely magnificent in the fore and then the other very characteristic thing about gingko which those who love the tree and watch the tree will know already is that it's probably got the most synchronized leaf drop of any tree that I know so you'll go out there one November morning in this part of the world and 80% of the leaves will come down in one evening and then you'll have this magnificent sort of halo around the trunk of these incredible gingko leaves I gave this talk at the University of the South in in Suwanee and they have a tradition there because the leaves come down about the same at the beginning of Advent they collect them all up and then they have a kind of community project where they sow the little yellow gingko leaves to make these little yellow roses they make hundreds of them and they decorate their trample with them for the Advent season and then the leaves are sort of shared and they're among the last to succumb to the compost heap they're tough thick leathery leaves and that's one of the things that gives gingko such a good fossil record as we'll talk about in a moment I think there are sort of three features that that lead to the sort of excellent fossil record of gingko one is they're easy to recognize you don't you don't confuse them with anything else second is that they're kind of tough that thick cuticles a lot of resinous material in the leaf and the other is that there's good evidence that gingko was of Waterside plant so it was growing in the kinds of habitats that are disproportionately well represented in the fossil record and you know when just to think about this this phenomena of deciduous nests that we that's so easy for us to take for granted so much part of our life but you know we sometimes don't stop to think about how amazing it is Kirk Johnson who's now the director of the natural National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC was a graduate student at Yale he was very interested in leaves in the fossil record he wanted to know how many leaves there were on a tree so he cut one down and counted it wasn't a very big tree it was a maple tree total number was just shy of a hundred thousand so on a big gingko tree you're probably talking two or three hundred thousand leaves and they may produce those two or three hundred thousand leaves every year for a century or a couple of centuries or two and a half centuries it's a pretty amazing evolutionary phenomenon and obviously as you all know that rhythm on the outside is reflected in the rhythm on the inside and gingko Wood is remarkably homogeneous my friend al Scott Strobel who loves to work on the lathe and scavenges trees from around campus as they as they come down says that the chisel goes through a gingko would like a knife through butter very easy wood to work and if you look closely you'll see that same rhythm reflected in the bark - I love this image this is a specimen from the economic botany collection at Kew and we had about 20 of these boards each of a woody plant species and each image is painted on a board made out of the wood of the tree that's represented in the image so this is a picture of ginkgo painted onto a ginkgo board and then framed with these little gingko twigs it was made at the University of Tokyo in 1878 for the early teaching of western botany in Tokyo and I think you can see in that image both a reflection of the eastern and western styles the the the way that the the branch is represented but also the highlighting of these botanical details and we also as part of the little paper we did on this track down some similar boards not ginko that they have here in the Harvard collections as well so just a little bit about the lifecycle the common name for ginkgo in in Chinese is silver apricot and they do kind of look like apricots but with this silvery waxy sheen on them but they don't smell like apricots when they come down and I thought I'd just sort of talk you through the sequence you perhaps know it already but the ginkgo is dioecious male and female trees like some of the species we've been talking about this afternoon and the pollen cones on the male trees are produced and the the ovulate structures on the female trees have produced just as the the buds break and here I've got a little time lapse if I can kind of get it to work of the pollen catkins here just the hissing these two pollen sacs splitting on a nice dry day in April around here and then producing hundreds of thousands of pollen grains the vast numbers of pollen grains produced from a single tree and while that's happening on the male trees in perfect synchrony on the the female trees the young novels are producing their pollination drop and obviously some of those pollen grains got to find their way to that pollination drop for pollination and then subsequently fertilization to occur pollen grains are about 40 microns or so long they're sort of football shaped and they sink in the pollination drop as you'll see in a moment here you can see this is artificially done by the way you can see these there's a very large number of pollen grains in that pollination droplet you see them sinking so that's happening around about April in this part of the world what's interesting about ginkgo is that fertilization doesn't happen immediately but once pollination has occurred the food reserved for the embryo starts to develop in advance of fertilization and so by August time this is what the seeds will look like this they're still green typically one produced on each ovulate shoot'em and one aborting and the final kind of intimate details of Ginkgo reproduction were only figured out at the end of the last end of the 19th century in 1896 by this man soccer guru Hiro see working at the University of Tokyo he was actually a technician of botanical artist but a very careful observer and this is the tree the female tree that he was working on and he was slicing up the developing seeds and he saw for the first time and this is his illustration there on the left and a photo micrograph there on the right the spiral sperm the the spiral band of flagella on the sperm cells of gingko but more importantly he realized that this plant had swimming sperm so here are the two sperm produced from a single pollen grain swimming around inside the ovule now just before they're released and of course they swim just a small distance to fertilize the ovule it's worth kind of seeing that again because it's kind of it's kind of fun you can see the spiral band of jelly there so this was pretty astonishing discovery actually because no no normal tree behaves like that we don't see that in conifers we don't see that in flowering plants pretty quickly actually in the same year it was noticed that the same thing occurs in cycads but this was an extraordinary discovery it was one of the most important early scientific discoveries made in Japan after the opening of Japan to the west and so it's well known by scientists in Japan the emperor for example is written about this story of her a/c and here's just a picture of the sperm cells swimming around on a slide they swim pointed end first as that spiral band propels the sperm cells through the fluid so anyway that's happening in September in early September and her a/c described it and then actually Mary Stopes who was a paleobotanist before she became interested in birth control and family planning and human sexuality and so on she was there in Tokyo in the early part of the 20th century she also observed she describes in her diary going into the lab every day cutting up gingko seeds and seeing the swimming sperm I like to show that this tree because some of when you talk to people about gingko they have strong views about female gingko trees because they do smell pretty bad in the small they've smelt like let's just say it human vomit in the fall so they smell really really bad and some people would just like to cut those female gingko trees down but I like to show this this is a large female gingko right outside the garage door of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Lloyd Wright built his home and studio you know Park Illinois not far from where our home is in Illinois and a friend of Mines father was an apprentice for Frank Lloyd Wright and recalls vividly Frank Lloyd Wright complaining about the stink of those ginkgos every fall but what I like about the story is he never cut it down he lived with it unlike some people and he no doubt appreciated that tree and ginkgo also suckers very effectively from the base this is a tree just outside of Shanghai China but it also has another peculiar characteristic of producing these strange downward growing shoots you don't see that very often on trees in Europe and North America I think it's a feature of older trees this particular tree of Peoria Illinois is starting to to show it maybe it's a a reflection of stress but when you go to Japan you can really see it and these things look like stalactites coming down from this tree and then of course when they hit the ground they then send up sucker shoots and so pretty soon the whole tree is less like a tree and more like a thicket and you've got shoots coming up every which way and it's a very very interesting phenomenon Peter del Giudice who was here at the garden looked at the anatomy and development of these chi chi and they're similar a process seems to occur very early in seedling development actually he thought it was a feature that helps stabilize the seedling in unstable habitats early in their in their growth and there are all kinds as you might imagine there are all kinds of sort of Legends and things associated with these downward-pointing branches that are often associated with fertility and so on so another thing that happens when you when you start to look at a tree sort of intensively you start to see that occasionally they do strange things so one thing that's very clear in ginkgo and I don't think is is widely enough recognized we were talking about this for sale a--casey earlier today so mail trees will occasionally produce a few seeds and that definitely happens and I've just seen a tree in Japan a month or so ago that was clearly doing that when you sit when it happens in gardens people often explain it away as a graft the re-emergence of an old graft but it definitely happens so that's a kind of an interesting phenomena another interesting phenomenon you saw that there were two sperm cells produced from each pollen grain and there are more than there's more than one archegonium there so occasionally a ginkgo C will produce twins and that's what's happening in this picture on the right you've got two embryos emerging from a single seed so here's what the sucker chutes look like in ginkgo the leaves are very deeply devided if you remember back to that very first image that I showed you this very fan shaped leaf but remember ginkgo biloba where's the bi-lo being in that early fan shaped leaf well here you see the low being in space it's more than by Road and that's a feature that you see in the early fossil record of ginkgo so these are leaves from the early Jurassic of Afghanistan they're about a hundred and ninety million years before present this is a specimen in the Swedish Museum of Natural History you wouldn't mistake them for anything else they're clearly ginkgo but the leaves are more highly divided than a typical gingko this is my old mentor Tom Harris one of my great mentors and he took me to a locality in Yorkshire he worked on the middle Jurassic of Yorkshire he took me to a locality just outside of Scarborough in Yorkshire called skull penis where we collected fossil ginkgo leaves from the beds of an ancient river that was making its way out into the region of what's now the North Sea and I've been back there many many times since and I've never failed to come away with ginkgo it's always there it's the most common thing in that deposit there about a hundred and seventy million years old so just a brief digression on sort of where ginkgo fits so it's one of five groups of seed plants and conifers many people have spoken about conifers today how many species are conifers somewhere between four hundred and fifty six hundred something like that depending on your species concepts neat a Lee's somewhere north of a hundred species cycads maybe at a hundred or a couple hundred species angiosperms 350,000 species ginkgo one species so it's a very important and distinctive plant and we would be the poorer if it had actually gone extinct where it came from we don't know I have my own views about that I think that it may well be related to some of these plants that appear in the early Mesozoic in the upper Triassic of South Africa we don't really know what ginkgos relationships are i-i-i would love to know and we have some ideas that where we're trying to test but this is my colleague from china professor joel and he's a good friend he was one of the first Chinese scientists to be led out of China to come and work we worked together in the same lab at the University of Reading back in 1980 he wasn't interested in ginkgo then but when he went back to China he started to work on ginkgo and he's really expanded our knowledge of fossil ginkgo in very significant ways here's some of the material that he's worked on from China you can see this material is very well preserved you can peel it off the rock it's one of the specimens and if you look carefully yeah you can see that there are some seeds there there may be also be some pollen cones by the way but those seeds which you see in a little bit more detail here large and born on separate stalks so that's a little bit different from the situation in modern ginkgo and actually show through his work has documented that in the Jurassic of China in this one pit that he was looking at there are at least three different kinds of ginkgo with slightly different leaves and certainly different reproductive structures this one is the closest to ginkgo this one here but then there's another one that he calls Yemaya here where you've got a kind of real cluster of seeds and more deeply divided leaves and here's another one this is car Kenya which we know now from the northern and southern hemisphere and in this one the ovules are reflex turned back on each other so there's the point is that he's shown not just from the leaves which are often a little difficult to sort of interpret what's the range of variation there but from understanding the seeds and which seeds go with which leaves he's been able to show that there were many gingko species on the landscape now I'm going to digress a little bit here because if we want to figure we're ginkgo fits we really need to understand what its reproductive structures are and how they should be properly compared to the reproductive structures of other seed plants and I don't have an answer but just a month ago I was in Japan looking at a cluster of trees at a place called me Nobu which is not far from Mount Fuji and that little cluster of trees has been known about actually from for over a hundred years it was fuji who was very close to Mary Stopes in fact who described these for the first time now a typical gingko bears its ovules sort of two on a shoot like you can see there but in some of the trees in manobo and you can see on the the right hand side there you've got much more branched of your bearing shoes and and some of them were highly branched and some of those shoots are not determinate they also can develop into little leafy shoots and then of course the other thing that they notice it occasionally you'll have seeds produced on the leaves and one of the things that we're sort of interested in it does this have any meaning with respect to interpreting the homologies of ginkgo reproductive structures so that's one kind of issue of what's what's going on with the development in ginkgo here and then I'm going to just digress a little bit more from my ginkgos story now and because many of us have been speaking about conifers today so this time next week I'll be on my way to Mongolia we've got a field project going on in Mongolia working on fossil plants that are about 130 million years old from Mongolia among them is gingko and Andrew Leslie who's here is working as part of the team on that project but also our collaborator in Chicago and China and and in Japan but I I couldn't resist taking this opportunity to show you some of the conifers that we've been getting from this location these localities in Mongolia and they're beautifully preserved there's about half a dozen species of conifers that we've been focusing on not all we've worked some of them up we haven't up to all of them up here's one that we haven't worked up beautiful cones 130 million years old you can pull those seeds off you can look at the the braixen and so on so this is clearly pine AC we don't know how it fits within modern pine AC maybe something like Picea here's another one a different species fewer fewer scales not so obvious what this is related to but here's one that we have worked up and Andrew Leslie took the lead on this project and this is a really strange one because it's got by lobed of you Liveris scales so here are the scales thereby lobed winged seeds produced on the surface of those scales we've got enough specimens that we understand a little bit about the development and again what's interesting here is that there are modern conifers that will occasionally produce these kinds of strange by lobed scales this is a an old paper by grits and Dupuis published in in 74 showing these by lobe cone scales so we think that this this particular fossil it's called chozo lepidopterists is an early member or maybe a stem group member of the of the pine AC group but we've got other conifers there too early cupressaceae for example this is a Taiwan iya like fossil and then another one that we've just published elet ids I'll just show you a few specimens gorgeous stuff beautifully preserved very similar to extant Coningham eeeh and so both Cunningham eeeh and our Ehlert IDs the Cunningham you like clientele at IDs and maybe the Taiwan eeeh like thing a down near the base of this queue press AC tax Oh DAC clay and then adjust for the last one I just show you we're just in the process of publishing this bizarre conifer cone and this has really crazy cone scales spikey once and this is actually the best-known representative of a group that's really a kind of key group for understanding how our modern conifer families diverge these are the so called transitional conifers of the vault CA Lee's and out of these transitional conifers comma are at least our current understanding comma our current group our current families of conifers I won't dwell on this work this is work again done by Andrew Lesley who's here on conifer phylogeny and friday geography in that case anyway back to the gingko story couldn't resist doing that little so I think for the conifer fans in the room so this is also about the same age as the material from Mongolia but this is a leaf of you Mya like plant from Australia so gingko was in the southern hemisphere - this is actually from Victoria from the kumara fish beds and very similar leaves occur in India occur in Argentina this was obviously a widespread plant before the southern continents were fully dispersed so it so it's easy to say 130 million years ago these are old plants but the world was a very different place 130 million years ago with very different continent configurations very different configurations of ocean land very different climates and ginkgo has seen all of that change the diversity of Ginkgo through time is difficult to estimate but this little diagram is probably the best attempt at it by Professor Cheryl and what it basically shows is that you've got a lot of diversity in the middle of the Mesozoic but by the end of the Mesozoic um particularly between the early cretaceous and the late cretaceous the diversity of these gingko plants seems to decline so it's a very crude pattern and very crudely what's happening at the same time is that that's the time that flowering plants are expanding so in a way the difference between the diverse Kinko's of the Mesozoic and the species poor gingko that we have today just one one species is something that's happening during the middle of the cretaceous as opposed to what you might think in the animal world at the end of the Cretaceous in the transition to the early cretaceous gingko was probably already down to a single species by the tork maybe two species by the time that these kinds of animals were around this is the famous diorama from the Peabody Museum at Yale with a rather overweight t-rex standing right in front of a ginkgo in the background with a pterodactyl soaring overhead couldn't be better this is a very strange time in Earth history because at this time you had very strange animals but mixed up with plants that were very similar to today not only gingko but also a whole range of flowering plants that we've been looking at for the last thirty years we now know many extant groups of flowering plants were part of these these landscapes so when you next look at a ginkgo you'll probably see some tomorrow just remember these guys new ginkgo as well and whatever happened to these guys at the cretaceous-tertiary boundary ginkgo didn't appear to notice so ginkgo is there before the boundary before the KT Cataclysm and it's there after the boundary this is a ginkgo leaf from a locality called Almonte in North Dakota and at that locality we had the seeds of gingko and we were able to show at that locality how the seeds were born and they were born exactly as they are in modern ginko - at the end of a novel of your bearing store one of them aborted you could see the little aborted of your on one of them fully developed by the time of the Almonte fossils in the northern hemisphere ginkgo had probably gone from the southern hemisphere or any of those ginkgo like relatives had gone from the southern hemisphere we last see them in the in the paleo scene but throughout the Cenozoic ginkgo is widespread in the northern hemisphere and during the great warmth of the Eocene we had gingko growing at very high latitudes in places like Spitsbergen Arctic Canada Alaska and then as the temperature cooled as global climate cooled around 40 million years ago but around the beginning of the Oligocene gingko is still there still widespread but now moving into lower latitudes we see it in Europe we see it in North America we last see it in North America about 15 million years ago somewhat later in Europe less than five million years ago so the sort of picture of Ginkgo evolution is really a kind of a 200 250 million year old story that starts in the Triassic where their origin expands to a diversity of gingko species during the critique Jurassic and Cretaceous declines in the Late Cretaceous restricted now to the northern hemisphere but still widespread but then within the last 15 to 5 million years local extinction regional extinction in Europe regional extinction in North America we last seared in Western North America as I said about 15 million years ago in Washington State and then thereafter only in Asia so the great paradox of this is here you've got one of the great surviving plants of all time that almost didn't make it and what was it that was so upsetting to gingko about the last 15 to 5 million years and you might ask the same about many other conifers that were once widely distributed in Europe and in North America but today occur only medecine cause a classic example today occur only in China so it's hard to pin down if there are any real native populations of ginkgo left in China I think the current evidence room from the Chinese botanist who've looked at the genetic diversity they see the greatest diversity in these two localities inland at Jin foo mountain and then closer to Shanghai and the coast at West chanimal Mountain here's one Jin fool Mountain and here's a classic picture from West TNM amount in but there are big ginkgos scattered around in China there is one in Szechuan and it's particularly appropriate to show this today that photograph over there was take on the left was taken by Ernest Henry Wilson and work for the Arnold Arboretum took it in 1908 in China some of his images are outside in the coffee area that tree is still there it's hard to photograph it's in the middle of the village but here's my cue colleague Tony Kirk I'm sitting on the base of that tree and you get a sense of that that's a pretty big gingko yeah and there are lots of other big ginkgos around in China this one on the outskirts of Shanghai this one not far from Nanjing and often still revered little Buddhist altar at the base there's a long record of cultivating plants in China a long written record of the cultivation of plants in China gingko does not appear in that written record until about a thousand years ago there's good written records from about a thousand years ago and they refer to it as a nut tree and it's probably those seeds which can be eaten if you get rid of that smelly stuff on the outside and focus on the gametophyte on the inside there saved ginkgo so if you look at the literature in China and Japan you see around about a thousand years ago the common names appearing silver apricot that I've mentioned duck foot that relates to the shape of the leaf white fruit white I grandfather grandchild tree and you see those similar names appearing in Japan but only later so ginkgo was moved like many plants moved from China to Japan during historical times probably during the medieval period probably on boats like this this is that a reconstruction of the shin and ship that went down off the coast of Korea in June 1323 full of ceramics from China but also one ginkgo seed on board if you go to Korea ginkgo is important here it is at a Confucian university in Seoul too big gingko trees there in Japan there are some huge gingko trees this is the one which I'll talk about later at the Kamakura shrine in Japan and here are just three of some 35 figures at a little Buddhist temple in ogia in central honshu up in the mountains of Japan and those 35 figures are all carved out of gingko wood and so gingko finds its way into Japanese culture here are some of the Japanese family crests here's a plate with decorated with gingko that was fired in the kilns of Kyushu about 1700 between 1700 and 1730 so how did gingko come to the West that's the kind of next question and many of you may know about this place this is the island of de Shima in Nagasaki Harbor which was the sole connection between Japan closed off to the outer world and its trading partners in Europe the Dutch had a monopoly on trading with Japan for several hundred years after the Portuguese and the CAF Rick's had been kicked out of Japan and so most of what the west learn about Japan and what Japan learned about the West was funneled through this island of de Shima in Nagasaki Harbor and particularly important for the gingko story is Engelbert camphor a physician to the Dutch East India Company based it - uma Kempf er arrived there in 1692 and when he returned he wrote his history of Japan or at least he published his ammonia Tottie's and then subsequently his papers were translated into the history of Japan and he provides the first Western illustration of ginkgo so this is 1712 and he is the one to first use the name ginkgo and he says there are born a separate nut tree folio an tiem Tartu leaves like a tea anthem the maidenhair fern and that's where the common name of ginkgo the maidenhair tree comes from Kemper was a remarkable guy some people think that Jonathan some of what Jonathan Swift wrote about in Gulliver's Travels was based on Kemper because Swift was part of the Royal Society at the same time that Kemper's papers were being translated by Sir Hans Sloane among the other interesting things he noted was the Japanese art of bonsai this just happens to be a ginkgo bonsai Kemper specimens still in the Natural History Museum in London they were purchased by Sloane they're now part of the Sloane collection so here's a ginkgo leaf that Kemper actually brought back from Japan in the early 1690s and then the adiantum that he collected while he was there - so so we knew about ginkgo in Europe in the early 1700s but what's interesting is that ginkgo was not mentioned by Linnaeus in his species plantarum in the 1750s he hadn't seen a specimen but and we don't think that and but kemper brought back living specimens we don't know when the first living specimens came back but it's likely that it was sometime around about 1730 - 1750 the ginkgo was introduced as a living plant first to Europe and by the 1750s and 1760s we know that a nursery man James Gordon clearly was growing gingko in his nursery in the Mile End in London and providing it to his wealthy clients and that's probably where the cue gingko came from and there's this wonderful letter written by Gordon in October 26 1769 my lord he's sending it to Linnaeus and he's saying how much he appreciates Linnaeus his work and he encloses at the bottom some specimens and one of them is ginkgo because he has he calls it ginkgo Kemp for I and then Linnaeus then having seen a specimen names ginkgo ginkgo biloba for the first time in the early 1770s and Linnaeus his specimen is also in London in the collections of the Linnean Society and there you do see the bye load leaves and those bye lobe leaves a characteristic of the long shoot leaves of ginkgo rather than the short shoot leaves most the leaves on a gingko tree produced on the short shoots they're the fan-shaped ones on the extension shoots on young plants you get these by lobe leaves gingko Linnaeus probably had a young plant of gingko and he got these young leaves so he caught it gingko biloba gingko may have come back to Europe from Japan but it could easily have come back to Europe also from China many European powers were also trading in China at that time and from a little later 1770 some one that I'm particularly interested in at the moment someone called John Bradbury Blake who was working for the British East India Company in Canton in 1770 knew about ginkgo was collecting ginkgo was sending living material back he could well have been one of the people who supplied ginko he says is a little I won't read it out in detail I can't even really see it but I read it before he says if you want to send back living Kinkos it's best to get the ones that have not been roasted he was obviously there they come down from the north they don't grow around Canton they're imported from a little further north and they're off tonight they were often roasted and he actually had Chinese artists producing illustrations and this is an unpublished illustration by a Chinese artist round about 1770 created for Bradbury play and then we know that by the 1780s ginkgo was being grown in North America and there's a large specimen of Barton's garden just outside of Philadelphia this is a photograph from the 30s of a large tree that stood on William Hamilton's old estate just outside of Philadelphia now turned into a cemetery and there are some big ones to his one on the Vanderbilt estate on the Hudson River in New York several physician botanists followed in Kemper's footsteps probably the most famous is two of the two of the other really famous ones are at Peter tunberg who was Linnaeus's student and who was in de Shima I think in the 1770s and then Francie bald who was there in the early part of the 19th century and Sebald was actually one of the people who was a decimal while Japan was closed and then went back to Japan after Japan opened up to the west and in the early part of the 19th century seaboard published this extraordinary image of Ginkgo in his flora japonicum lots that we could say about that image but perhaps even more interesting is that ginkgo had started to make an impression in Europe and this is the famous poem ginkgo biloba written by Goethe in 1815 and Goethe as you know was very instrumental in developing the science plant morphology but he was also very interested in a young lady who he wrote this poem to and he asks in this letter is this one leaf divided in two or is this two leaves joined together as one very significant poem in Germany so if you go to Vemma goethe's hometown you can see ginkgos on the streets here's one it's the only place I know that has a whole museum devoted to ginkgo - this is the ginkgo house in Vemma and you can buy every possible piece of ginkgo paraphernalia in the ginkgo museum and a lot of different cultivars of gingko I should say and every jewelry store in buy Mar has ginkgo jewelry but we know ginkgo best today probably as a street tree and in Japan as you know Tokyo was was bombed fire bombed during the Second World War Japanese government undertook trials to see which trees to plant and ginkgo was one of the trees that they fastened on it seems to be resistant in part to fire that was one of the reasons that they chose it does very well in urban situations this is actually at the University of Chicago but I could have shown pictures from Seoul or from Tokyo or or from just about every major city in the temperate world it's a very important street tree if you go to New York you can't miss it it's one of the most common trees in Manhattan but there are some beautiful avenues not least this one which is not my photograph but it's an absolutely beautiful photograph of a fantastic avenues of beautifully manicured trees in in gingko trees in Tokyo and the horticulturalists have had fun with ginkgo if you go to the plant science labs at Cambridge you can find a gingko growing up the wall there that's carefully pruned and obviously lots of variants from variegated Li ginkgos to these leaves these tubular ginkgos where the leafs doesn't unfurl properly but it was probably Kinkos uses a nut tree that saved that attracted it to people and when you get rid of that fleshy coat you're left with something that looks a bit like a pistachio and inside there you've got the developing comida fight as you can see on the right hand side with the embryo not yet well-developed and these seeds can be eaten in a variety of ways roasted or stir-fried you see them in a variety of ways in Chinese Korean and Japanese cuisine and obviously in China Korea and Japan ginkgo is is grown commercially not in huge quantities but this is a ginkgo orchard not far from Nagoya in Japan and this lady at the camera Kurush Ryan was was was heating up her ginkgo seeds in a wok and you can kind of buy them like chestnuts in an eat on the street or you could buy them vacuum-packed in Chinatown and then the other place that you probably see ginkgo is in the pharmacy because as you probably know it's very widely used herbal medicine supposed to be good for your memory and it's very popular in Europe and also increasingly in North America what's interesting about this use of of gingko is that this seems to be a European phenomenon this is not a phenomenon that Europe has brought in from the east because in fact ginkgo in traditional Chinese medicine it's mainly the seeds that are used this is an extract of the leaves and this is something that that that is in a sense being invented in in Europe and obviously in ginkgo is is culturally important I've mentioned Buddhism but also Confucianism and and Shintoism and you can find gingko in all kinds of incredible from the wacky Gilbert and George from the East End to this beautiful kimono you can even have ginkgo chairs if you'd like well that sort of brings us back to to my favorite ginkgo Accu and there's not really a kind of serious message to this book except that as a biography and as a biography that extends over a few hundred million years it's also to some extent a reflection on time and I think you know in the case of ginkgo oh it very nearly went extinct and we're very fortunate still to have it and the reason we have it is that we've cultivated it it became useful to us so we've we've cultivated it and Botanic Gardens like the Adam Arnold Arboretum like Q they have a role in cultivating some of these plants that are not doing so great in the wild a classic example here in North America is Franklin ear franklinia discovered by the BART rooms on the Atlantic coastal plain in Georgia last seen growing in the wild in the 1820s now totally extinct in the wild if we didn't have it growing in Botanical Gardens we simply wouldn't have it and so and you might say that there are some similar situations here's the famous while am i pine and many of you are conifer experts you'll know about the wall of my pine first discovered in the mid 1990s total population about a hundred trees in an isolated deep gorge not too far from Sydney in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales and in a very enlightened way the Australians have allowed it to be brought into cultivation so you can grow now the wall of my pine and I think that's a useful hedge against the next forest fire the next pathogen that comes into that population of a hundred individuals in and it is sort of paradoxical that ginko nearly went extinct it's been around for 200 million years goodness sake it's a kind of prime example of a survivor and it's an extremely resilient species I like to show this this this headline so an arborist who couldn't tell a disease down from a ginkgo cut down the wrong tree across from the White House in Farragut square and people were horrified that this would happen and I think it's kind of an interesting thing took 140 years for that thing to grow he cut it down in the morning that's an interesting kind of metaphor for us in the sort of broader time scales of evolutionary history we can do things very fast that make a big difference in the world but what I love about this story I did an interview for The Washington Post and the reporter was so interested he went out and looked at the stump goddamnit it's still it's still hanging on there you know it's still trying to to sprout from the base he's an even better example I call this this sort of the Second Life the Lazarus affecting it with a ginkgo you know they cut this gingko off at the top and the bottom and they left the stump there and then it started simply to sprout and so they've now moved it to to the campus on on Reed College the same is true of this tree that I showed you earlier this famous tree at the camera Corps in Japan which came down in a big storm in the spring of 2010 but he's being propagated again it's a very important tree for the Japanese so true it's resilient but it occasionally it's gonna need our help so anyway this tree has been there for a long time I think they've been 15 directors of cue I was privileged to be one of them it's seen them all come and go hopefully it'll see a few more come and go it was there in the 1880s this is from 1889 and so that sort of broader message of this amazing biography is is really what it asks us to reflect on which is you know a long-lived tree long-lived individuals hundreds of years old in a very long-lived lineage just asked us to reflect a little bit more carefully about everything that we lose when we're always so focused on the short term so I hope you have enjoyed this this little tour through the gingko life history it's been a great pleasure to have the chance to talk to you this afternoon thank you very much you

Channel: New Phytologist Foundation

Views: 60,766

Keywords: Biology (Media Genre), Evolution (Quotation Subject), Culture (Website Category), Darwin, Ginkgo (Organism Classification), Maidenhair Tree (Organism Classification), Plant Science, New Phytologist

Id: WBogvipUIK8

Length: 56min 31sec (3391 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2015