Peter Crane, being interviewed by Roger Cohn for Yale e360:
When we think about flowering plants, there are about 350,000 living species. And in an evolutionary sense, they’re equivalent to that one species of ginkgo. They’re all more closely related to each other than they are to anything else. But the ginkgo is solitary and unique, not very obviously related to any living plant.
Ginkgoes are fonts of great trivia. One of my favorites: In the autumn, ginkgoes will shed their leaves in rapid fashion, in some cases going from golden yellow to completely bare in less than a day.