John Green reviews a particular Ginkgo biloba tree.
John Green reviews a particular Ginkgo biloba tree.
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Hello and welcome to The Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. I’m John Green, and today, I’ll be reviewing a particular ginkgo biloba tree about a half-mile from my home on the northwest side of Indianapolis. Before that, though, I have to say a quick thank you to everyone who has read The Anthropocene Reviewed book, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has been welcomed into the world with extraordinary generosity. Hearing your responses to the book--via email, or tweet, or strangest of all via reviews on a five-star scale--has meant a great deal to me. Thank you for reading it, and thanks for sharing it.
Okay. So when I was in college, I took a class in American religion where we read one of those mid-19th century American novels that luxuriates in description. Moby-Dick is the classic example of the genre, but this novel was a far lesser entry in the canon of verbosity. I no longer remember the title or the plot of this book; all I can recall is this one passage, which went on for pages and pages, where the author described a tree. Every knob and every branch, every leaf and ridge of bark were elucidated, as if the reader had never previously seen a tree.
Thinking about this passage now, I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s essay “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” where she writes that the difficulty of writing novels in the 20th century is that “the tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one.”
Perhaps to a 19th century reader, a seven-page description of a tree was thrilling because it more or less described the thing, but to my 20-year-old eyes in 1997, this adjective-laden description buckling under the weight of its own sincerity embodied everything that I disliked about literature, and so I wrote a paper all about how much I detested the book, and as part of my impassioned defense of lean, people-centric prose, I proclaimed that any writing that devotes thousands of words to a single tree is definitionally bad writing.
And now, here I am, 23 years removed from absolutely hating that seven-page description of a tree, here to share with you a seven-page description of a tree. Be careful what you ridicule, my friends, for in time you will become it.
Let’s begin at the beginning, or at least the current prevailing model of the beginning: 13.8 billion years ago, everything that would become this tree was contained within an unfathomably dense point of matter, which then expanded into everything we now know as the universe. Where was the tree before this? Well, strangely, there really was no before, because in addition to creating space as we now understand it, this Big Bang also created time as we now understand it. Writing of Georg Cantor’s set theory, the mathematician David Hilbert famously said, “No one can expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us,” which is sort of how I feel about the Big Bang. It is maybe not as resonant as some Creation narratives, but nobody can expel us from the paradise of space and time being interdependent.
So everything that the tree now is exploded from this singularity, and all the matter in the universe for a time was very hot and moving very fast, and then it slowed down and cooled off. Over time--like, billions of years of time--everything spread out, and the stuff that would become the tree ended up in a galaxy that we call the Milky Way, and then eventually most of what would become the tree was stardust orbiting a young star called the Sun, and then about 4 billion years ago, the Earth formed as that stardust coalesced into a planet. Every atom that would later become this tree was in the solar system by the time Earth formed, but only in the sense that an alphabet contains a novel.
Here in central Indiana, the fossil record stretches back hundreds of millions of years--there are sea creatures fossilized beneath us from the many times what is now the American midwest was ocean floor, and there is also--beginning in the Carboniferous Age around 300 million years ago--evidence of plants, including early tree-ish plants like Lepidendron. The first members of the genus ginkgo show up in the fossil record about 270 million years ago. By the Jurassic Age, around 200 million years ago, several species of Ginkgo trees were spreading around Earth’s land, and in the age of the dinosaurs, vast forests of them flourished.
Ginkgo biloba, the only species from the genus still alive today, seems at least from what fossils can tell us very similar--and perhaps identical--to the ginkgo trees that grew over 100 million years ago, and here in central Indiana, there were probably ginkgos many millions of years ago; a 2020 excavation of a site just north of Indianapolis found fossils of likely ginkgos. But the genus saw a huge decline during the Pliocene epoch, which ended two and a half million years ago. The ginkgos died out in most of the world. Here in Indiana, a series of huge glaciers swept in from the north, killing trees and many other species and covering the land with sheets of ice thousands of feet thick.
When the last glacier retreated around 14,000 years ago, it left behind loamy, nutrient-dense soil, and in time hardwood forests began to grow along the banks of the White River. But by then, the ginkgos were long gone from here--instead, the forests were thick with sycamores, and sugar maples, and beech trees.
As ginkgoes were wiped out in North America and most other places in the last few million years, the Ginkgo biloba survived only in what is now Central China. And then, beginning at some point over a thousand years ago, the trees started to be cultivated by humans--its nuts are edible, and parts of the trees have long been used in traditional Chinese medicine. Ginkgo trees were also sacred to many Buddhist and Confucian communities; some individual trees planted near temples in China are believed to be over 1,500 years old. Through cultivation, the trees spread--first to Korea and Japan, and then throughout Afroeurasia, and by the late 18th century, to the Americas.
And so when a Ginkgo biloba tree was introduced to a little forest along the White River about 130 years ago, it was not the first ginkgo tree to have grown in this neighborhood, just the first one to have been here in over two million years.
Today, this tree is about 90 feet tall, with a trunk about three feet in diameter. Through geology and fossil records, we can glimpse how long trees like this have been around, but to understand this particular tree, we must consider another timescale, that of human history. The tree grows on land long inhabited by Miami people. Many members of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma trace their ancestry to what is now called central Indiana, and members of the Miami Nation still live in the area, although the U.S. federal government has refused to recognize the Miami Nation of Indiana for over a century.
The particular piece of land this tree shades sits about a hundred meters east and fifteen meters above the White River, which was named by Miami people for its white-sand riverbed. We know several groups of Native Americans hunted, fished, and farmed in this area. The Miami grew a variety of white corn that flourished in the rich soil left behind after that glacier’s retreat, but the ginkgo is on land that was probably never farmed, but has instead been a hardwood forest for the last ten or twelve thousand years.
This land probably would’ve been cleared for the kind of spread-out, low-density housing and commercial development that sprawls across so much of the region, except that this little forest is partly in the river’s flood plain and partly on some of the only proper topography in Indianapolis--the river and the creeks that feed it have cut cliffs and arroyos into the area, making building impractical, and so the forest--about fifteen acres in total--has remained a forest.
Picking my way through this stretch of woods on a summer morning, everything except for that ginkgo tree makes a kind of sense. At my feet, there are patches of stinging nettles on the ground intermingled with ferns and the waist-high reeds of flood plain. Above me, the overstory--crowns of sycamores and oaks and sugar maples. There are many species of plant in the forest, but even the invasive ones like honeysuckle answer to a kind of logic--they look, basically, midwestern. Lovely. A bit dense in places. Unpretentious.
But not the ginkgo. It sticks out like a camera-toting tourist. Long before I knew this tree was a ginkgo tree, I knew it was weird. It was weird because of its leaves, thick and waxy and resembling a fan blade or an enlarged flower petal. The veins in a ginkgo leaf do not branch and spider out like the leaves I am accustomed to; instead, they are tiny, nearly parallel lines that converge at the base of the leaf like a calculus problem--the veins growing infinitely closer without ever quite touching.
And I knew the tree was weird because of its shape--while the oaks and sycamores spread their crowns across as much of the sky as they can muster, the ginkgo is vaguely cone-shaped, like an unruly, 90-foot tall Christmas tree. But also, I noticed it before I knew it was a living fossil or a medicinal tree or anything else because the trees around the ginkgo give it a wide berth, leaving space in the canopy above, as if they also know it doesn’t quite belong here but still want to make space for it.
In the autumn, ginkgo leaves turn a bright yellow and then fall all at once, sometimes in a single day. Most years, I’ve missed this. One day, I walk past the ginkgo tree and the leaves are bright above me, and the next time I’m in these woods, those leaves are beneath my feet. But last year, I caught it. I happened to be in the woods as the leaves were falling, dozens of them every minute, fluttering down in long helices.
A few days later, the branches were totally leafless, and I could imagine the invisible symmetry of the tree, how the branches splinter out and grow up, reaching toward sunlight, just as their roots branch out and down, reaching for water and stability. But in summertimso many millions of years old.
Here is an embarrassing secret: It was only last year, that brutal and homebound spring, when I discovered how leaves happen. They grow right out of the branches! They emerge from within the tree, leaf from wood, green from grey, growth from growth. Surely I had known this on some level before, but last year was the first time I saw it. It looked a bit like a birth, albeit in extremely slow motion.
What a peculiar world this is, where life emerges only from life but must, at some point, have emerged from something else.
After the break, I meet the novelist Kurt Vonnegut at the ginkgo tree, at least in a roundabout way, but first…
AD BREAK
Toward the end of the 19th century, the land containing the ginkgo tree was purchased by a married couple--Sophia and Peter Lieber. Peter was a U.S. civil war veteran who walked with a pronounced limp as a result of injuries sustained in the war. Their family had gotten rich in the brewing business, and bought the land as a kind of country estate.
The ginkgo tree was probably planted around 1890 by their son, Albert Lieber--or more exactly, by his gardener. Albert Lieber was a philandering partier who worked sparingly and managed to spend almost all of his parents’ fortune. Part of that spending went to planning and planting ornate gardens all around his extensive properties, including the installation of novel tree species in the riverside woods beneath the family home. When Lieber died, in 1934, the vast tract of land was split up and sold for development. Most of what were once phenomenal gardens are gone now, and today the old Lieber property contains over a hundred houses, a golf course, three apartment buildings, and a McDonald’s. Most of the trees Lieber had planted were cut down amid all that development--but the ginkgo survived.
It is here that my life, and the ginkgo tree, intersect with the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose grandfather was this very same hard-drinking, big-spending, garden-funding, ginkgo-planting Albert Lieber. In his quasi-autobiography Palm Sunday, Vonnegut writes, “We have come now to a rascal, Albert Lieber, whose emotional faithlessness to his children, in my humble opinion, contributed substantially to my mother’s eventual suicide.” Albert and his second wife, Ora, were abusive to the children--subjecting them, as one contemporary wrote, “to every sort of indignity, humiliation, and neglect.”
Edith Lieber Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut’s mother, became--as Vonnegut liked to say--”half cracked.” I am also half cracked, and because we walked the same woods, I often think of Edith. Before marrying, she lived for a time in a cottage that looked out at the ginkgo tree from its kitchen window. When I think of the tree, I think of its beauty, but I also think of a young woman who could not escape the abuse and terror of home, because home extended out for miles in every direction, and because she felt she had no choice but to live the life her father demanded of her. How must she have felt when looking out at that ginkgo? The tree was smaller then, but it must have still been beautiful and strange in that forest.
A few years ago, an 85-year-old neighbor of mine asked if he could meet with me to discuss what he described as “a few matters.” I was only distantly acquainted with this neighbor, but I knew he had a reputation for eccentricity. Our only previous conversation had involved his habit of flying a different flag from his front yard flagpole each day. On one day, he’d fly the flag of Sweden; the next, an LGBTQ pride flag, the next, the Alaska state flag. I asked him one morning how his flag schedule worked, expecting him to tell me about independence days and pride months, but instead he said, “I wake up each morning, and I look at the sky, and the sky tells me which flag is called for.”
I figured the meeting would involve a request for publishing advice or something, but in fact my neighbor just wanted to take me through the forest and explain some things. We walked down an arroyo behind his house where, in spring, a creek dribbles toward the river, and as we walked, my neighbor pointed out a huge sycamore tree, the tallest in the forest. “That’s Zeus,” he said of the tree. “The God of Gods.”
“Okay,” I told him. This was my kind of meeting. After another minute of slow walking--the ground was muddy, and my neighbor’s balance unsteady--we approached a thick bramble of honeysuckle bushes, which he explained was in fact a fairy garden. He then gestured to another sycamore near the river’s edge. “Beneath that tree is the wedding chapel,” he told me, and I knew what he meant. Something about the tree and the way its branches sagged slightly seemed to create a chapel’s ceiling, and the shade cast by the tree did seem like a holy place, and a celebratory one.
At last, we came to the ginkgo tree. “The mother of light,” he said. As we stood beneath it, he grabbed one of those fanned leaves and examined it. He called the ginkgo tree, “the oldest lady in town.” He told me that Zeus had a name, but the ginkgo tree did not, because she was older than names. He said that maybe Zeus had been alive longer than this particular ginkgo, but that leaves just like this one had been eaten by dinosaurs. “Everything her age is a fossil,” he told me, and then added, almost as an afterthought, “You know, they found ginkgo fossils in North Dakota that are a thousand times older than sin.”
It was the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had in my life, but now when I walk in the forest, I think of the old man, and his names have become my names. I say hello to Zeus as I walk, and find myself hoping that someday I will be 85 years old, and I will request a meeting with some young whippersnapper, so that I can introduce them to Zeus and the fairy garden and the wedding chapel and the oldest lady in town.
I did not realize until later that what my neighbor called the oldest lady in town is, in fact, a female tree. Oaks and sycamores are monoecious, meaning they have male and female flowers on the same plant, and with both pollen and fruit being produced by the tree, each tree contains within it the possibility of more. But ginkgo trees are dioecious, meaning that individual trees are either male or female, and depend upon wind to move pollen from male trees to fertilize female ones. This means that the ginkgo tree will have no children, as there are no male ginkgo trees anywhere nearby, at least not that I’ve found. And I’d likely know, since the male trees are extremely allergenic, producing lots of pollen, and I am, when it comes to seasonal allergies and most other things, rather frail in constitution.
Incidentally, the spherical fruit produced by female trees, like the one in the forest, smells horrid--it is often said to smell like vomit, which if anything is generous. And so one day each year, this ginkgo tree drops a blanket of golden petals to the ground, and a few weeks each year, she smells like a norovirus infection.
We contain multitudes.
Anaïs Nin wrote that we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. I don’t want to describe the ginkgo tree as it is; I want to describe it as I am. Why do I love this tree so much? Why did my neighbor love it? Why do I imagine, boldly, that Edith Lieber Vonnegut loved it when there was so little in her life that she could trust with love?
Well, perhaps we should acknowledge the astonishing resilience of the ginkgo. They are often said to be excellent city trees, because they are not bothered by pollution or concrete or disturbed land or salty soil. From Manhattan to Seoul, you’ll find ginkgos where you don’t find other trees. And so ginkgoes are often used as metaphors for adaptability and tenacity. And it is true that I want to be adaptable and tenacious, but I don’t think that’s what sends me again and again to the ginkgo’s shade, even when it smells like death. I think I come back here for the same reason Gertrude Stein said there are so few masterpieces: It is easy enough to describe something, or even to comprehend something, as it is. But what really thrills the human soul is to be in the presence of something wondrous, something that makes us feel, in both time and space, very small. There is so much I won’t ever know. I will never know how Edith Lieber Vonnegut felt when she saw from her kitchen window this tree drop all its leaves in one furious afternoon. But I know the thrill I feel beneath the ginkgo tree, how looking up at it makes me feel an awe that contains both wonder and fear at its edges. In the presence of this tree, I am before something, as my neighbor put it, vastly older than sin, older even than hope as I know it. I’ve spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn’t for anything, that it doesn’t mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I’m able to feel--if only in moments--why I am here--that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know. And most of all, I am here to be. To be not just on this planet, but with it. I am here to be with you, to be with my family, and even to be with the forest. The gift is being itself, and who better to teach me about that than the oldest lady in town.
I give that ginkgo tree five stars.
Thanks for listening to The Anthropocene Reviewed, which was written by me, edited by Stan Muller, and produced by Rosianna Halse Rojas. Hannis Brown made the music. Thanks also to Gordon, Sarah, the Indiana State Museum, and Chris Merritt and Merritt Chase for helping me understand this ginkgo tree and the history of its area. If you’d like to suggest a topic for review or just say hi, you can email us at anthropocenereviewed at gmail dot com. And I hope you’ll check out the Anthropocene Reviewed book, available in a lovely hardcover and also as an audiobook read by me and as an ebook. We’ll be back with another episode at some point this summer; in the meantime, we leave you with the sounds beneath that ginkgo tree on a recent summer afternoon. Thanks for being here.