Behind the Ironic Column

Shakespeare didn’t have the gingko tree in mind when he wrote the line “yellow leaves, or none, or few  do hang….”    The gingko in its full display of brilliant autumn yellow is the opposite of “none or few.”   The leaves are everywhere – glowing in shafts of fall sunlight, drifting through the air, piling in drifts on the ground or cars or anything else in their path.   One of the surprising things to me is that gingkos tend to drop a huge number of leaves all at once.  I can pass by a tree today and admire the leaves glowing on the tree and tomorrow morning almost all of them may be on the ground – as if a blizzard of yellow had passed through.

If I’d ever lived in a place where a large ornamental tree could be planted, gingko would have been my choice.  The fall yellow of a tulip poplar, which I did have in my yard in Virginia, is almost as nice but there’s some different quality to gingko yellow.  Not to mention the beautiful lobed leaves and that slightly mysterious air. 

It is, after all, a “living fossil.”  I first saw one when I was a freshman in college and my biology teacher took a group of us on a  tree-finding expedition around the campus.  I’d never even heard of them before.  But I recognized the leaf – that pattern turns up in Japanese and Chinese art all the time.  I just hadn’t realized that the tree itself could grow other places. 

These days they’re planted as ornamentals in many cities.  In one of the downtown parks in Portland, we have rows of them.  All dropping their golden leaves at once.

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