Many people, about two dozen toads, a cat, some ants, and nineteen species of plants including camphor trees, a Gingko, 铜钱草，a Magnolia, 红花檵木（Loropetalum chinense), winter jasmine, a species of rhododendron and others less readily identified. This catalog of living things observed in the park this weekend is a small sampling of the local population. Most of the species are insects, inferring from general taxonomy. But we are more familiar with the plants: we select and cultivate them, arrange them in gardens and delight in their varied forms, colors and fragrances, not to mention their uses as food, medicine etc.
One beguiling quality of the plants that we grow is their persisting wildness. They are wild by virtue of their individuality, and also by virtue of their relationships with the rest of wild nature: especially the insects, the sun, the wind and the rain. Plants may seem like familiar and predictable fixtures of the environment, but they are also rich reservoirs of information about dynamic systems outside our control, and potentially outside our present awareness.
Take for example the leaf. I am holding the leaf of a Ginkgo tree, it’s fan-like shape so distinct from leaves of the maple or the locust or the willow. Why are the veins longitudinal and non-branching, the margins lobed, the surface soft and flimsy? The Ginkgo is a “living fossil” that has survived for millennia, the last extant species of a division of plants thought to have once been prevalent worldwide. Pushed almost to extinction by the profusion of flowering plants that occurred in the early Cretaceous era, the sole remaining species of Ginkgo persisted between glacier flows around present day Qinghai-Tibet, and survived there until its recent dispersal by human botanical enthusiasts.
The leaf of the Ginkgo does not exactly tell this story, but it’s plain to see that its evolutionary path is distinct from the broad leafed flowering plants with their interconnecting networks of veins, but different also from other gymnosperms (e.g. conifers). The leaf of the Ginkgo, sized so perfectly to the human eye, is a gateway to a maze of unanswered questions as well as unthought of possibilities.
The Ginkgo is the national tree of China, called 银杏 (‘yinxing’, meaning “silver apricot” in reference to its tasty seed). Like its distinctive leaf, the strange name by which it is known to much of the rest of the world invites research. In this case the story opens onto a human drama of ocean trade and cultural and linguistic crossed wires. The Ginkgo is a beautiful case of a human-plant relationship that has mutually affected each species over the centuries, subtly influencing geographic, biological and cultural migrations. These kinds of relationships may be near to insignificant when contrasted with our family ties and social relations, but the plants around us should not be taken for granted. Like the air we breathe (and reciprocally implicated in the air we breathe) plants are alive with secrets and surprises.
Click here to read more about our investigation of vernacular plants around Shanghai.