Ginkgo Biloba
By Richard Hackler
“Ginkgo Biloba” first appeared in Rooted 2: the Best New Arboreal Nonfiction
The ginkgo biloba tree has been around, in something like its current form, for over 200 million years. Its natural range once spanned forests around the globe, but contemporary ginkgos are a tame species: they live in cities, mostly, in parks and arboretums and wherever else we’ve decided to put them. And it makes sense that we’d keep them around: ginkgos are a hearty, endlessly adaptable tree, able to thrive in the cramped spaces and depleted soils of, say, the strip of land between the sidewalk and street in front of my apartment, in a deindustrialized stretch of Northeast Minneapolis.
Plus, they’re beautiful trees, with fan-shaped leaves that turn a shocked yellow in October and shimmer over my house like a constellation of tiny suns. This is what my neighborhood is like in the fall: the sunlight sifting through the ginkgos, filling the air with a pale, insistent light as lovely as a hymn. But then in November—after the skies have grayed and the winds picked up—the leaves fall, all at once, and collect on our sidewalks in big florescent clumps that I kick apart while I wait for the bus, blowing into my hands beneath the stricken ginkgos, their limbs mute as extinguished candles.
The ginkgos, though leafless, aren’t yet naked. They still have their seeds. Ginkgo biloba seeds are the size and color of apricots, and they hang almost luridly from their branches, making the trees look like a band of knobby, leering ghosts. The seeds dangle for a week or two—poised, almost, beneath the steely skies—until it starts to get cold for real, around mid-November, and the seeds begin dropping, at first one by one (you’ll hear a thud on your roof and think: maybe a squirrel?), and then faster, and then, for a day or two, it’s a torrent—they land like hail on our houses and cars and heads, collect in mounds in our yards and gardens, splatter and rot and ruin paint jobs, grind into a paste that slicks the sidewalk, stick to our shoes, and follow us inside, wherever we go. And, famously, they release a stench when they fall that reminds some people of vomit but to me smells like rotting flesh or dogshit. The smell hangs over the neighborhood like a mood, an expression of the sullenness most of us feel here in mid-November in this cold, gray city.
My neighbors get so angry about this, every year, when the wind is sharp and smells like dogshit. My neighbors stand at their stoops, frown into the breeze, drink their coffee and say, Why do we have these trees? The city should do something Someone should cut those things down!
And I stand there on the sidewalk and nod and say, Yes, yes, they sure do smell, they sure are messy, someone should get a chainsaw, ha ha! And then I say goodbye and continue on my walk.
I say this to be polite because, really, I love our ginkgo trees. For their beauty, sure, for the way they transform my neighborhood’s October into an elegy for summer; and for their adaptability, for the line I can draw from the gingko in front of my house to one whose seeds fed dinosaurs during the Jurassic. But I love them most for the way they mess with us, every year, raining their seeds on our heads like a mock plague, a sly rebuke and gleeful giving away of the lies that animate our worst ideas: that we are separate from the natural world, that we are rightly in control and can act on nature however we like.
Most cities have taken to planting only male ginkgo trees, which don’t develop seeds, but even this isn’t fool proof: it’s difficult to identify the sex of a young gingko and, hilariously, the branches of a male gingko can change sex and begin producing the seeds anyway. They do this when they sense there aren’t enough female trees around to continue reproducing. They do this so they can survive.
We plant ginkgo trees in our cities because we want it all: we want the beauty of the natural world and the ease and sterility of the industrial one. We want wide roads and short commutes and parks full of picturesque trees beneath which we can do yoga. We want 99 cent hamburgers and direct flights to London, and when we think of “nature,” we think of it first as a sort of psychic resource, a retreat we can drive to on summer weekends when we need to “recharge.” We want the giddy freedom of infinite, consequenceless choice, we comfortable people in leafy neighborhoods whose factories have been converted, charmingly, into food halls. And we want the nightmares this culture has helped unleash—the mass die-offs, the depleted aquifers, the burning hillsides and smoke-dimmed skies—to stay outside our field of vision.
But the ginkgo tree—with its fleshy and smelly and inconvenient aliveness—is an ambassador from that exiled natural world, and one that’s here, maybe, to remind us that we can’t exile nature. Not really. You are a part of nature, say the ginkgo trees, say the coyotes that stalk our suburban dogs, the raccoons that overturn our trash cans, the squirrels that thump around our attics, and all the other emissaries of mild chaos that might work to check our sense of control—if we wanted our sense of control checked. The truth, of course, is that we can understand the gingko however we like: as a gentle reprimand from the natural world, or as an exception to the rule of our dominance, an inconvenience we can either indulge or, when we’ve had enough, exterminate.
“We have no recourse at this point,” said Terry Robinson, the superintendent of Iowa City’s Forestry Division, in an interview with CBS News shortly before the city removed one of its last ginkgo trees. “It creates a sanitation problem for us because we have to be down there cleaning it up as often as possible.”
The natural world, as so many indigenous, radical, and mystical traditions have been demonstrating for millennia, can be understood any number of ways. It can be a place apart from us, a place we mournfully plunder, sighing and shrugging at humanity’s propensity to blow the tops off mountains and poison watersheds, or it can be everything, the entire world, including us and the gingko bilobas lining our streets. A limitless natural world is one in which we relinquish our dominance and the sense of alienation that makes plunder possible, and instead embrace our role as a part of a complex, varied whole. Such a shift would require an overhaul of our metaphors and narrative conventions—no more “nature” as separate, unpeopled and “unspoiled”; no more limitless growth as an economic imperative; no more nonhuman world as a discrete collection of resources for us to exploit. Instead, our approach would necessarily be humbler, more vulnerable and receptive to criticism, even when that criticism comes from a tree.
Whatever hope left for a future that isn’t an escalating nightmare rests in this shift, I think, this willingness to be checked and humbled by all of our neighbors, human and nonhuman alike, and to appreciate, love, and learn from the places we live.
And the ginkgo isn’t only a smelly nuisance—scrape away the flesh of the seed and you’re left with the nut, which one writer describes as the “camembert of nuts… complex and utterly good to eat.” Humans have been cultivating ginkgos for food for at least 1,000 years, and we may have even rescued them from extinction, as the trees had become rare, living only in isolated clumps in a few small pockets of China. Over the past millennium, though, ginkgos have retaken their former range, spreading throughout China into Korea and Japan and back into the Americas, where they hadn’t lived since before the last ice age. This story—one in which people grow with and give to a fellow creature, each working to ensure the other’s survival—could be lifted from a more hopeful history than we’re used to reading, one in which people are something more, something better, than spoilers of the natural world. There are stories like this throughout human history—stories of cooperation, of living within limits, of people using their gifts to give to the world’s abundance and diversity. These stories are told today by water protectors chaining themselves to excavating equipment, by neighborhood groups fighting to turn superfund sites into urban farms, by nuns climbing over fences to pray outside of missile silos, and by every person whose sense of self and solidarity extends radically, remarkably, to the land itself. These are stories we can all begin to tell, and strive to live by, though it requires the sort of sustained attention our wider culture was built to wring out of us.
But let’s try anyway: to reject the mournful platitudes of the plunderers, to refuse the nightmares delegated to us, and to recognize and nurture, instead, our ties to each other and the places we live, the places here to sustain us, just as we are here—this is true, I’m sure of it—to sustain them.
Richard Hackler lives in St Paul, Minnesota.