Where does Ginkgo tree come from?
The ginkgo comes from China, where a few populations that may be truly wild still survive in mountain refuges. It is the last living species of an ancient group of trees, and people have carried it from China to city streets around the world.
A living fossil
Fossils very like the living ginkgo go back about 170 million years, to the Jurassic, and some from a coal mine in central China show ginkgo-like trees with only slight differences in leaf shape. The group slowly dwindled, perhaps outcompeted by flowering plants, and ginkgos disappeared from North America and Europe as the climate cooled. By the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago, the survivors were confined to China. Today Ginkgo biloba is the only living species of its family.
Saved by people
For centuries the ginkgo was thought to be extinct in the wild. The ginkgo expert Peter Crane suggests that people in China may have begun planting it about 1,000 years ago, perhaps for its edible seeds, and some Chinese scholars think monks planted and preserved many of the old trees. In 2012 researchers reported evidence of a wild population in the Dalou Mountains of south-western China, and there are 'semiwild' stands in the Tianmu Mountains in the east. The IUCN lists the species as endangered in the wild.
Why people think of Japan
Ginkgos have been widely planted in Japan since the 14th century, Tokyo's symbol is a ginkgo-leaf shape, and in 1996 the city made the ginkgo its official tree. Even the tree's name came through Japan. The German naturalist Engelbert Kaempfer, the first Westerner to study it, saw it in Japanese temple gardens in 1690 and recorded the name ginkyō, 'silver apricot', with the spelling 'ginkgo' used by his Nagasaki interpreter. Yet Tokyo's own government describes the ginkgo as native to China.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · nationalgeographic.com ↗ · english.metro.tokyo.lg.jp ↗
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