We find the sturdy ginkgo tree growing in parks and gardens over most of the United States and southern Canada. It even can make a living rooted in a hole dug in the cement sidewalks of a city street. It is a reliable and ornamental tree, but, so far as we know, it grows wild nowhere in the world. But this was not always so. For our pretty ginkgo is the last survivor of an ancient family of trees which once forested much of the earth.

The pale ginkgo tree, tall and graceful, belongs to the ages. Its ancestors and their relatives shared the world with the dinosaurs. They covered vast areas of the land with their ferny foliage long before our oaks and elms, beeches and birches came to join the forest scenery. Some 50 million years ago, there were ginkgos across Asia, in Alaska and in much of the Northwest.

Some 60 million years ago, a thick forest of ginkgo trees near the great Columbia river was buried deep under showers of volcanic dust and ash. In time, fragments of these trees became petrified, or changed to stone. We have uncovered imprints of their fan shaped leaves and perfect copies in opal and jasper of their wood and small round seeds,

But time passed. The ginkgos lost ground as more modern trees developed and took over the forests. Then came the Ice Ages and glaciers more than a mile thick crept over much of North America, crushing whole forests under their cold, cruel weight. When the glaciers returned to the north, the ginkgo had perished from our land.

In parts of China, however, one member of the ancient ginkgo family managed to survive in the wild. The graceful tree, so different from most modern trees, was noticed by man the gardener.

It was carefully tended and cultivated and taken to live in the temple gardens of China. In fact, the Chinese cherished the ginkgo as a sacred tree.

This was lucky for the ancient tree because the wild ginkgos of China also were losing ground and soon died out entirely. The only survivors were those tended in man made gardens and some of these pampered pets are said to be over 1,000 years old. All the ginkgos in our parks and gardens are cultivated trees and, so far as we know, all descended from those specimens preserved in China.

In England, the ginkgo is often called the maidenhair fern tree because its pale green leaves, though thick and sparse, somewhat resemble the foliage of the dainty maidenhair fern. The slender trunk and rather straggly boughs often reach a height of 50 feet and very old specimens have been known to grow 120 feet tall.