Prepare for Gingko Biloba party day!

King St., Charleston, S.C.

I am not downtown everyday so I am asking those of you who might be to keep an eye on those Library Society trees. Any day now it will be Gingko Biloba party time! All the leaves will turn bright yellow and spin to the ground.

And yes, Virgina, there is a Gingko blog. 

The Gingko Biloba family of trees are so old they are assumed to have been around for 230 million years ago. Darwin called them 'living fossils'. The trees are so hardy that one of them lived through the atomic blast that destroyed Hiroshima.

Ginkgo biloba - The maidenhair tree

With their neat parachute shape, the leaves tend not to fall in a tidy heap, but to catch on branches of surrounding bushes. The actual material of the leaf is still quite resilient when fallen, and if they land on still water do not lie flat, resembling not so much a dead leaf as a drunken drowning butterfly, or miniature capsizing yacht.

Who wants to go gingko hunting with me in Japan next year?