This is the 3rd year that I've obsessively stalked a tree. Check out the darling of my attention this season--an ancient Ginkgo Biloba or Maidenhair tree--and you may also seek out a love interest in your neighborhood. Here in the RISD Museum's central courtyard, an ancient Ginkgo Biloba drops perhaps millions of florescent fan-shaped leaves in a couple of days, creating an ephemeral glowing carpet. How about that for phenomenological? Must hurry: leaves quickly brown if they're not swept off to dumps by maintenance crews first. Stalking a Ginkgo carpet is therefore necessary and very arguably worth it.
No one else seems to know about this tree, probably because it's mostly invisible from the street. Don't forget to look up. Our tree in October vs. November:
Why stalking is necessary: three days difference:
Through a Japanese Maple to the courtyard a few days before the Ginkgo leaves fall:
A few of my studies of a Ginkgo over a year:
Ginkgo Biloba trees are remarkable. They're considered living fossils with records dating back 270 million years. They have no living relatives. Clearly highly adaptable, they're also resistant to urban pollution which is unusual and makes them valuable in cities as a form of landscape infrastructure. Peter del Tredici, a great urban tree specialist, landscape architect, and ecologist, has written extensively on them. Check out the Harvard Magazine for more. Here's one of his images from a recent trip to discover naturally-occurring Ginkgo Biloba species in China:
I've been reading recently that they're at risk of not being planted as widely in cities because of the smell of the fruit the female tree produces. How quickly people forget that our world is more than just a visually-occurring place. It would be an ecological and experiential loss to our world to stop planting this great tree.
No one else seems to know about this tree, probably because it's mostly invisible from the street. Don't forget to look up. Our tree in October vs. November:
Why stalking is necessary: three days difference:
Through a Japanese Maple to the courtyard a few days before the Ginkgo leaves fall:
A few of my studies of a Ginkgo over a year:
Ginkgo Biloba trees are remarkable. They're considered living fossils with records dating back 270 million years. They have no living relatives. Clearly highly adaptable, they're also resistant to urban pollution which is unusual and makes them valuable in cities as a form of landscape infrastructure. Peter del Tredici, a great urban tree specialist, landscape architect, and ecologist, has written extensively on them. Check out the Harvard Magazine for more. Here's one of his images from a recent trip to discover naturally-occurring Ginkgo Biloba species in China:
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