11/14/08 A TALE FROM "JURASSIC PARK"

Friday, 7:45 AM. Wind SW, calm. The channel is wrinkled. The sky is overcast but the barometer predicts sunny skies. The rain gage holds almost an inch of rain. It will be good to see the sun again.
A while back I wrote about the tamaracks, larches and bald cypress, deciduous conifers (that drop their needle-like leaves in the fall), and thus are not “evergreens.” The tree pictured grows in Fountain Garden Park, and is yet another anomaly; a conifer (bearing cones) which is deciduous, but has broad flat leaves like non-coniferous trees (it does not have needles).
Tradition has it that it was discovered growing in a Chinese Buddhist monastery in the late 18th Century and it has been introduced all over the Northern Hemisphere since then. It is evidently extinct in the wild and has changed little if any since the Jurassic era. Ginko biloba, the maidenhair tree (so called because the leaves resemble those of the maidenhair fern) is the only living species in this isolated genus. It is a tough ornamental tree, beautiful and well adapted to city conditions and much used as a street tree. Only the male trees are usually grown, as the female “cones” have a very putrid odor when ripe. But, in the orient the seeds of the fleshy female cones are used for food.
The Ginko, saved as a sacred natural oddity for who knows how many years, has managed to survive for over 60 million years (while the dinosaurs did not) and now roams the earth once more…a true Jurassic Park tale!