The street between my house and the University of Kentucky back in the 70s was lined with Ginkgo trees. Fall always brings back the image of walking through the rain and fallen Gingko leaves. The golden leaves look like money, and they fall all at the same time, so that in the rain they stick to your shoes.
So walking through fallen Gingko leaves is a relatively rare event--one that I remember still 40 years later.

Later, I lived in Greensboro Alabama where I studied the history of this small rural Southern town. I read about a Greensboro woman who became a missionary in China, and brought a Gingko back home and planted it in front of her house. This was in the 1830s.

On one of my walks exploring the back streets of this village--I noticed that someone had cut down a large tree, some 5 ft in diameter, and there were the sprouts and a few of dead leaves--revealing that the tree was a Gingko. I checked the location and realized that the tree could well be the gingko that the missionary planted in the 1830s. I went back to the tree to see if I could salvage one or two of the sprouts trying to regrow around the tree. But by then, the courageous sprouts had been doused with Round-Up. Dead, the Gingko was finally dead, after living for 150 years of providing shade from the blazing summer sun.