What's A Ginkgo?

Trying to keep the ball rolling with a quick one (well, quicker). Big up to everyone who peeped out the site at my behest. And now, 180 degrees opposite of my last post, I want to talk about trees.

As many of you who attended UT know, trees abound in Knoxville. A close second to that kind of tree is the dogwood, which has the yearly festival and tour etc. But I contend that the ginkgo tree is an almost-as-striking feature of the Knoxville landscape. Also called the maidenhair tree before westerners realized "oh, yeah, the Chinese named this tree circa 1100 AD, re-naming it probably makes us sound like colonial assholes or something." But I digress. I realize writing about plant life is kinda for nerds (I almost said "herbs," that woulda been too cute), but I was taught that the ginkgo was a big deal, as far as trees go. When my 5th-grade class went to the Ann Arbor (MI) botanical gardens, the park ranger guy told us all about how they were living fossils, once found wild across the globe (before mammals), eventually dying in all but the most rural parts of China, and if not for the efforts of monks who liked 'em enough to cultivate the last surviving species (ginkgo biloba--yes, the same as the herbal supplement for cognition), they would have gone the way of the passenger pigeon. The tree our class saw was a pitiful, six-foot-tall specimen. Nowhere else in Ann Arbor, and after moving to suburban Detroit and then Nashville, do I recall seeing another ginkgo. Then I moved to Knoxville and suddenly they were taking over and ruling shit like "RAAAGHH!"

Ginkgoes are appealing and distinctive enough to be memorable to me across all those years and moves. Once you know what the leaves look like, I guarantee you'll always remember them, too. I felt a jolt when I recognized the one-of-a-kind ginkgo leaf on a tree so large that I was actually climbing in it, the enormous tree in the courtyard to the left of the door of UT's Clement Hall. A bunch of us were chilling in the lower branches, about 10 feet up. I used to hang out in the courtyard under that tree's shade everyday, but I never saw it's leaves up close because they were all above me--this monster was probably six stories high. Because of the one I saw as a kid, I assumed all ginkgoes were small and ornamental, but here was one I had assumed to be an oak or something. It's bark was reddish-brown and gnarled like a sequoia, not the grey, dogwood-like bark found on the saplings. While I was up there, propped on a knobby branch, I saw this big chunk of wood and bark that looked exactly like a mask--no, seriously, like if you wanted to be an "ent" for Halloween. It had eye holes and sat atop your head without straps, the whole nine. I had never seen anything else like it, so I took it back to my room. But when Dustin saw I had it, he was like "DUDE! Why did you steal The Guardian?" and I was all "whatever," but then I realized he was right. A tree like that deserved respect, not to be ripped off, so I put it back. As hard as he may have partied, Dustin was still an excellent moral compass.

When I lived behind the Pilot on Sevier, there was another huge ginkgo in my backyard that I had the pleasure of seeing from bed every morning through my second floor window. It's canopy was over the roof and it totally freaked out my botany-nerd Mom when she visited me. However, for all the emphasis I'm placing on the big guys, some of my favorites were two rows of youngsters merely 10 feet tall.

One of the coolest features of the ginkgo--easiest to see on small trees like these aforementioned favorites--is that they are great examples of fractals in nature. The leaves grow from twigs that radiate in a spiral around the circumference of the branches. (I first realized this effect one night when I, my buddy Jason, and two crazy underage girls visiting him walked past these particular trees on our way from Maplehurst to the Underground. The acid was just kicking in. In that mind-frame, not only did I notice the leaves grew down the branches in a spiral, but those spirals were actually starting to spin around. It later became the type of trip where I was looking at statues and buildings that I'd seen sober a million times, but this time they were covered with orderly, geometric bas-relief hieroglyphics and I told myself "oh, yeah, but that was always there." Again, I digress.)

These rows of ginkgoes lined both the bits of Cumberland and Main that make an isosceles triangle with Henley St. They separated the street from the sidewalk and were planted at regular intervals in those cast-iron tree grates. Facing west, the rows converged on either side of you as the streets met near the railroad underpass--the tip of the triangle. Also, the land sloped downhill, so the effect was three-dimensional. Couple that with the regular spacing, the uniform size of the plantings, and the delicate, spiraled features of the small trees; the overall effect was a feeling that they were welcoming you, like you were stepping into munchkin land or something. I'm using the past-tense when describing them not because I don't live in Knoxville anymore, but because they were all chopped down. Both sides of the street. One day they just vanished, their thin stumps level with their cast-iron grates. Massacred. It was one of a thousand subliminal messages the town was sending me: "I don't like you, and anything you find beauty in or makes you happy to be my citizen, I will destroy! Beat it!" Eventually, I started listening to those messages.

And don't none of y'all be saying "Gink-Go," either. If it were spelled the way it sounds, the "k" and the second "g" would be reversed. Just say "ginko"; the first "g" is hard (like me, bitch!) and the second "g" is silent. Aiight, G?