Nelson: Karen's Ginkgo

Lanzhou - Gansu Province, PR China, just a bit below the Gobi Desert, mid-autumn 1994 - acknowledged as one of the ten most polluted cities in the world.
Densely stacked layer upon layer of viscous grey - particularly solid now, with people beginning to heat their homes with low-grade coal - essentially coal-dust mud, shaped and dried into uniform round chunks and sold by the piece. No sun - ever! It left in frustration long before the beginning even of ever!
Very little green - most left with the sun, and what stayed behind has no choice but to conform. Fit in.

On the Lanzhou University campus, the Ginkgo tree in front of a building housing faculty has taken pity on me in my first autumn here: It reminds me of a sun and its possibilities out there somewhere, by completely cloaking itself and the predictably grey concrete tiles under and around it in a feather-light, buttery-yellow shiver. Being over two storeys tall and quite broad, it fills the two windows of my apartment. And when I step outside on my balcony - I do this often now - I can almost touch it. The tree feeds me, grounds and comforts me. When I have to I am reluctant to leave its shelter; when I come back I can see it from farther off - a torch! - and I hurry. Then I walk under it, stop and look up.

After a few days of this - coming back from morning-lectures - I find the area of the tree has been swept clean of leaves. A shock! This repeats daily - I go out in the morning, and the ground is carpeted with yellow Ginkgo leaves; I come back, and they have been swept-up and taken away. But there are many leaves on this tree, so no matter how often the caretaker sweeps - though the shiver is thinning - the tree will continue to be what it has been to me for a little while now. I think!

Then - one late afternoon when I come back - the most shocking sight: There is not one leaf left on the tree and the ground! Not a single one! The caretaker - seemingly partly because Chinese have a passion for sweeping, partly because the leaves made it all too untidy-looking, and partly because he was too lazy to deal with this any longer - somehow managed to get up and into the tree and take down every single leaf! The torch has been extinguished!
Later I find out that he is doing this every year - a well-working strategy: He waits for the leaves to be loose enough on the stem - so to speak - then shakes the branches and beats them with a bamboo pole!
This despite the Ginkgo being China's national tree and its medicinal properties well-known and widely appreciated - in what we call traditional Chinese medicine - for a few thousand years. The caretaker would know this - not so much its beauty and affirmation of light-thus-life. A job is a job!

There are many remarkable facets to the Ginkgo - it is the oldest living direct-line whatever - catalogued as a "living fossil" and reaching back about 270 million years; it has no close living relatives; it does not flower - there are male and female trees. Don't ask - it's complicated! The female - predictably - bears fruit, in appearance somewhat like a green walnut; with its seed in China called yin xing - silver almond - and eaten as a special treat.

In Japan - six Ginkgoes are among the very few living things/beings to survive the far-reaching atomic-bomb devastation of Hiroshima, growing within less than two kilometers of the blast. Though seemingly completely charred - their cores remain healthy; these trees recover and are still alive today! There are Ginkgoes said to be 2500 years young.

In the West - the Ginkgo has been intensively studied scientifically and accepted as having medicinal value - particularly in prevention/treatment of memory loss. A Ginkgo's long memory!

Nelson - Province of British Columbia, Canada, just a bit below Elephant Mountain, mid-autumn 2011 - acknowledged as a place with very little pollution.

The last tree on the east-west beach promenade - closest to the bridge - is a male Ginkgo biloba. It's the only one in that row of trees with age and girth, planted rather too close to its neighbor, and - relatively shade-intolerant - for years growing-up literally in the shade of its big, overpowering cousin many-times-removed. What with branches on its west-side reaching into those of  this neighbor and vice versa, much of the year the Ginkgo is not particularly prominent. And in autumn, its own feather-light, buttery-yellow shiver - although just as delicate as that of the Ginkgo in Lanzhou - is not standing out as much because of many colorful maples in the vicinity. Also - the air is clean, so the sun has no reason to leave for long.

Then - about a year ago - the cousin is cut-down, and suddenly this Ginkgo has enough space all around to just be. Now apparent is that its branches on the big-cousin side are sparse - intimidated and too close for independent development - but the trunk has managed to pull away somewhat from the influence, even though that means also away from the sun! An I've-gotta-be-me sort of thing!

All reminiscent of Nelson - in a larger context.

Well, it can come into its own now, but I wonder how much time will pass before branches fill-in and this Ginkgo stands-up (straight) for itself.

One thing is certain - now that we are having our first nights of grass crackling whitely - very soon this tree's leaves will turn that yellow, nobody will compulsively sweep them up every day. And I will stand under it and look up.

Although my blog often is about shaking the tree to see what will fall out - it will not be this one!

To Karen MacDonald, Keeper of Works and Parks!