On the morning of 21 June, 2011, Sheila Wertheimer, our Gardens Supervisor, arrived on campus with a beautiful Ginkgo tree to be planted in front of the Krieble Gallery. It required the help of Randy Robinson, our Groundskeeper, and two landscapers from Wertheimer and Associates - Jerry LeFever and Brian Renshaw -to get this tree off the truck and properly planted. The ginkgo tree is replacing a Japanese Tree Lilac that had occupied that space previously - but not altogether successfully.
A few months earlier it was noted by the Museum’s Buildings and Grounds Committee that the Japanese Tree Lilac tree in front of the Gallery was not doing well. It was decided to replace it with a species that would prove long-lived, durable and resistant to drought conditions. After much discussion, over a period of a month or so, the Committee accepted Sheila’s recommended choice of species.
The Ginkgo, (Ginkgoaceae), the oldest tree in captivity, is often called the Maidenhair Tree. Its native habitat is Eastern China where it was first introduced to the US in 1784. One of the world’s oldest trees, it has no living relatives. It was native to North America at one time. Dendrologists and gardeners alike often refer to the ginkgo as “undoubtedly one of the most distinct and beautiful of all deciduous trees:” (W.J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, variable dates).
It’s distinctive fan-like shaped leaves turn a stunning golden yellow in the autumn.
(Excerpt from Wikipedia - Ginkgo palaeontology)
The Ginkgo is a living fossil, with fossils recognizably related to modern Ginkgo from the Permian, dating back 270 million years. The most plausible ancestral group for the order Ginkgoales is the Pteridospermatophyta, also known as the ”seed ferns”; specifically the order Peltraspermales. The closest living relatives of the clade are the cycads, which share with the extant G. biloba the characteristic of motile sperm. Fossils attributable to the genus Ginkgo first appeared in the Early Jurassic and the genus diversified and spread throughout the Laurasia during the middle Jurassic and early Cretaceous. It declined in diversity as the Cretaceous progressed, and by the Paleocene, the Ginkgo adiantoides was the only Ginkgo species left in the Northern Hemisphere while a markedly different (and poorly documented) form persisted in the Southern Hemisphere. At the end of the Pliocene, Ginkgo fossils disappeared from the fossil record everywhere except in a small area of central China where the modern species survived. It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished. Given the slow pace of evolution and morphological similarity between members of the genus, there may have been only one or two species existing in the Northern Hemisphere through the entirety of the Cenozoic: present-day G. biloba (including G. adiantoides) and G. gardneri from the Paleocene of Scotland.
