My Ginkgo Tree

Standing majestic, some 50 meter tall, in my garden is a ginkgo tree. I didn’t know it was a ginkgo tree when I first moved into my present house, until someone told me so. The tree is supposed to originate from China and according to Harun Yahya's 'Atlas of Creation', the ginkgo tree is 65 million years old based on fossils of its leaves. It is the source of the popular supplement pill ‘ginkgo biloboa’, supposedly good for blood circulation and memory. Since then I have seen other ginkgo trees in private gardens here but not one quite as big and attractive as mine.

I enjoy seeing how the tree transform itself with the seasons. At present it is barren, since it last golden leaf of autumn fell to the ground. In Spring it will sprint tiny leaves which will open up to full glory by the end of May. The colour of the beautiful curly fan-shaped leaves also changes with the seasons, starting from light to dark green, then yellow to gold and rust in autumn. When my brother Long came to visit me one early Summer, he was excited when I pointed out that the tree in the garden was a ginkgo.Thereafter he would at every meal time pluck a handful of the young leaves and eat them raw with his rice, often with sambal belacan! At first I was worried if it was all right for him to eat them but he was confident about it, and later declared that the only effect of his consumption of the leaves was a need to pee more often than usual!
The first Summer after I moved into the house, the tree bore an abundance of fruits and they hang pretty like little yellow cherries all over the trees. At the end of Summer they dropped to the ground, making a carpet of fruits which latter rotted leaving behind hard-shelled seeds. The rotting fruits had a distinctly unpleasant foul smell. The hard-shelled seeds are supposed to be washed and dried and later cracked for the kernel inside. In the Chinese custom these are used for medicinal purpose or for making sweet porridge. I kept the dried up nuts and gave them to a visiting friend who came to stay with me on one occasion.

What I didn’t know then was that the tree does not bear fruit every year. And since that bountiful season, two Summers have passed without any fruit borne by the tree.

A stage occurrence took place in my garden the Summer following that bountiful season. I would often see holes all over my otherwise manicured lawn. Both my gardener and housekeeper could not explain this occurrence until one day I decided to check some out the holes myself. In one of them I found a ginkgo nut and this explained everything.

There is a little black squirrel that lives in the trees of my garden and this squirrel was the one which buried the nuts to store them during Winter, and in Summer digs them up again for consumption. Very cute!

Anyway my little black squirrel has now become quite big and is sometimes bold enough to come near the patio where I would often have my meals in the warmer Summer days. I wonder it he or she has a family as I have never seen two of them. I like watchingit fleet from tree to tree and wonder where its abode is in Winter.

As for my ginkgo tree, I hope they bear fruits next Summer.