The Anthropocene Reviewed · Complexly, John Green

Ginkgo Biloba

June 30, 2021·28 min·2 clips

The ginkgo tree has survived since the age of dinosaurs, making it a living fossil in a modern forest.

A single ginkgo carries the review. Green starts close to home, on the northwest side of Indianapolis, where one tree breaks the pattern of a Midwestern floodplain. First comes a thank you. The Anthropocene Reviewed book has arrived generously, even getting reviewed by readers on the show's own five-star terms. Then the tree takes over. He remembers a college novel whose only lasting trace is a too-long tree description, annoying but hard to forget. The ginkgo earns that kind of attention. Around it, stinging nettles, ferns, reeds, sycamores, oaks, sugar maples, and honeysuckle all make sense together. The ginkgo does not. Its leaves are thick, waxy fans, with veins that run almost parallel and nearly meet. Its shape is stranger still. Next to the wide crowns of oaks and sycamores, it looks like an unruly ninety-foot Christmas tree. Even the nearby trees seem aware of it. They leave a wide gap in the canopy, as if giving this odd thing room. Autumn makes the weirdness harder to miss. The leaves turn bright yellow and can drop all at once, sometimes in a single day. Most years, he misses it. Last year, he arrived as they were falling, dozens each minute, and a normal walk briefly felt staged. The essay stays with one living thing long enough for weirdness to start feeling like belonging. Green gives the tree five stars, then leaves listeners under it, with summer sounds still going.

As heard by us

A quiet, observant piece that turns one ginkgo tree into a meditation on attention.

The episode gives a small piece of Indianapolis room to breathe. John Green starts with a college memory and follows it into a single ginkgo tree, then into the leaves, shape, and the way it disappears and returns with the season.

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Why you'd press play

A quiet walk with one very odd ginkgo tree, and a lot to notice.

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