🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <90euvj$qvg@unix2.cc.ksu.edu>, reikirk@ksu.edu (Bob Kirk) wrote:

> Appears not to have been posted a couple weeks ago:
> 
>    I really don't have time to mess with this, and various searches a few
> days back proved fruitless, but re the unchallenged assertion that Ginkgo
> has only been in the USA since (?) 1913:
>    Michael Dirr lists this as introduced to cultivation in 1787, which 
> per style [of his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants] would be the earliest
> recorded Western cultivation, but 1913 seems >awfully< late for something
> that's been around that long to have reached the US.
>    Besides, a passage sticks in my mind - Oliver Wendell Holmes (I don't
> know whether the father (1809-94) or son (1841-1935) proposing to his
> future wife on (?) Boston Commons: "Will you take the Long Walk with me?"
> And failing correction I believe that was in the non-metaphorical sense an
> avenue of ginkgo trees which must thus by sometime around the mid-1800's
> have been sufficiently mature to be a named landscape feature.
> 
According to A. J. Downing in his 'Landscape Gardening and Rural
Architecture', first published in 1832, there were established Ginkos in
Philadelphia as early as 1805. At the time he wrote the book Gingkos were
still a very rare tree, and worthy of specific mention.

-- 
Kay Cangemi

A chiel 's amang ye takin' notes - Burns

New York, USDA zone 5
http://www.ulster.net/~cangemi