Tough Old Tree

Gingo Biloba

Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten

Meinem Garten anvertraut,

Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,

Wie's den Wissenden erbaut.

Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen,

Das sich in sich selbst getrennt?

Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen,

Dass man sie als eines kennt.

Solche Frage zu erwidern,

Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn.

Fühlst du nicht in meinen Liedern,

Dass ich Eins und doppelt bin.

from "Buch Suleika" in Goethe's "West-östlicher Divan"

Yes, the Gingko is a well established motif among Goetheverehrer and Bildungsbürger generally. It also has come to represent the paradoxes of Orientalism and European contact with China and Japan.

The first Westerner to note the Ginkgo Biloba tree was the botanist, Engelbert Kaempfer, who served with the Dutch East India Company and was shown the tree in a garden in Nagasaki. Seeds he brought back were planted in Utrecht, where the trees still stand.

The Ginkgo trees are very hardy and have been known to live for well over 1000 years. Six trees survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They continue to grow there today. You can find pictures of how architecture has been designed around these surviving trees in the rebuilding of Nagasaki, here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kwanten/hiroshima.htm

Outside my office there is a thick gnarly Gingko. For about a week in Spring, it drops small greenish translucent bulbs, which are often gathered up by Chinese graduate students. Whenever I walk past a cluster of students stashing these bulbs into plastic grocery bags, I want to ask them what they plan to do with them, can they be cooked up into food, or a tea or medicine. But I don't want to seem like the nosy professor, I don't want to sound intimidating, like the native speaker questioning the foreigner, so I usually just keep walking past the tree and the gleaners to the student center food court where I usually get a quick sushi or orange chicken for lunch.